I've seen this problem posed in the mail archives but no applicable solution
so here goes again.

I'm trying to install netBSD 1.1 on a 1.2 GB IDE drive (all by itself; no
DOS) and am having trouble getting the bootstrap code going. It gives a
"Read Error" upon boot. I can do the bootstrapping from a floppy then boot
from wd(0,a) but I'd much prefer to boot totally from the IDE drive.  This
smells of a disk geometry problem but I (and others) have beat on it
profusely and we are at a loss as to what to try next. 

The geometry reported upon boot is:

	wd0 at wdc0 drive 0: 1222MB, 2484 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 
		512 bytes/sec <WDC AC31200F>

and the BIOS's description of the disk is the same. Output of fdisk under
netbsd (if this is actually pertinent) is:

	******* Working on device /dev/rwd0d *******
	parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
	cylinders=2484 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
	
	Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cylinder 1
	parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
	cylinders=2484 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
	
	Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
	Information from DOS bootblock is:
	The data for partition 0 is:
	<UNUSED>
	The data for partition 1 is:
	<UNUSED>
	The data for partition 2 is:
	<UNUSED>
	The data for partition 3 is:
	sysid 165 (NetBSD or 386BSD)
	    start 0, size 50000 (24 MB), flag 80
	        beg: cylinder    0, head   0, sector  1
	        end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63
	
One odd thing is that it reports the ending sector on head 255(?) but since
I'm not putting DOS on it, I'm not sure this really matters. I booted from a
DOS floppy and pfdisk reported a different geometry (620c, 64h, 63s)
however, installing with these gives the same result (Read Error).  Also,
the BIOS has settings for disk access mode which can be set to DOS or Other
but neither setting in combination with the above geometries work (same ole
Read Error).

Can anyone shed some light here on determining what exactly its looking for 
in the way of disk geometry?

Charlie