The jist of my original message was:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 it to bootstrap correctly. 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. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some comrades hacked on it a bit and it turns out to be an apparent bug in
the BIOS. The netbsd inital boot program expects the boot device to be held
in register %dl (I *think* the BIOS is supposed to set this when it finds
something to boot from). It is supposed to get set to 0x80 to signify the
hard drive but instead remains 0x00 which represents the floppy. So
basically, the netbsd primary boot code was trying to load the secondary
code from the empty floppy drive. 

We hardwired it to grab the secondary code from the hard drive and it works.

Charlie