Mounting miniroot fails?

[Rhialto <rhialto%falu.nl@localhost>]

I just built a bootable USB stick to try out the latest -current with
age0 added and see if it detects the ethernet interface of my Eee 901
(it doesn't).

This is what I have on my stick:

 Volume in drive M has no label
 Volume Serial Number is EDED-1E0E
Directory for M:/

netbsd   gz    4563207 2009-01-21  20:34  netbsd.gz
MINIRO~1 KMO   1027801 2009-01-21  21:06  miniroot.kmod
stand        <DIR>     2009-01-21  20:37  stand
boot             60900 2009-01-21  20:41  boot
boot     cfg       793 2009-01-21  20:45  boot.cfg
        5 files           5 652 701 bytes
                        122 294 272 bytes free

While doing that I came across some interesting details.

The USB stick is FAT-formatted, therefore it automatically loads the
msdos module, but not the ffs module. The result is that it can't mount
the miniroot.kmod.

This is fixable by altering the boot sequence to

load /miniroot.kmod
load ffs
boot netbsd.gz

However that still doesn't work, even though now apparently md0a gets
mounted, no files can be found on it: no /dev/console, no /sbin/init.
So booting stops right there.

Then, if you play around a bit, you get keyboard errors. I've seen a few
variants, including a kernel trap on each keypress, but I've made a
photo of the latest case. It is mainly to illustrate the lack of
/dev/console and /sbin/init.  http://www.falu.nl/~rhialto/missing-init.png

Is there any way I can verify what's in the filesystem in miniroot.kmod?

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert    -- You author it, and I'll reader it.
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl      -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse.