I've more info now, so perhaps I can get some
advice.

 > It was going so well until I decided to
 > reboot my machine!  I'm running netbsd-1.1
 > on a i386.

>From the one message I have received so far it appears
that my initial message was not clear. This whole
problem started as I was trying to add a DOS partition
to my disk. When I installed netbsd I left enough room
for DOS (in the disklabel) but I never actually got
around to mucking with fdisk to make everything nice.

Anyway I had a working system and started munging with
fdisk to make the netbsd disklabel and bios partition
table be in sync. I saved the new disk partition and thats
when things went wrong. The numbers I gave to fdisk were
not correct and so when I rebooted the machine (using shutdown)
it was no longer able to start up.

So thats where things were yesterday.

Well I did some more exploring. It turns out that I have a
version of fdisk from netbsd-1.0 on my second IDE drive
which I can mount just fine. So I ran that version and used
it to restore the previous partition table. Well almost, the
original partition table only had partition 4 marked as in
use, now partition 1 also has info for DOS, but its marked
as in-active. Does that matter?

So re-wrote what I thought was the original partition table.

Something must be atleast partly right since I am now able
to use disklabel to read the old netbsd label and I can
mount both unix partitions (/ and /usr) from the drive.

Great!

But I still can't boot.

So now what I hoping for is some info from someone who can tell
me whats missing or wrong with my setup.

What happens: When the machine reboots it goes through
its normal sequence. The hard drive light goes on and
then no more. Normally what would happen is that I would
get the netbsd boot prompt.

I suspect that either the boot code in the boot record has
somehow become corrupted (but how could that happen since
I've written it several times?) or the boot code in the netbsd
partition has become corrupt.

Oh--one last bit of info. When I've had the bios partition table
wrong I used to get the message "no operating system found" or
something like that.

Thanks for any help.

-Ram
ram@cs.arizona.edu