Thanks to all who replied. I have persevered and learned a few things.

First, the correct (new) sysid for NetBSD is 169. The old one was shared
with other free Unix systems; it was 165.

The disk which would hang the BIOS on the ASUS worked on another system.
I was having MBR and disk geometry problems.

Everything started working much better when I changed the BIOS setting for
the disk drive from AUTO to LBA. The BIOS on the ASUS P2L97 can deal with
a big disk (1036MB Maxtor 71084 A) in C/H/S mode but NetBSD uses LBA. This
led to mass confusion and corrupted data on the disk.

Perhaps this should be included in the installation instructions or in a
FAQ. If my conclusion is correct :-).

I have decided to include a DOS partition (about 2MB) at the beginning of
all the disks I use for NetBSD. On this partition, I install DOS and the
utilities from the i386/installation/misc directory (also InfoPlus). I
also use OS-BS. This has a few advantages: in an emergency I can boot to
DOS to create another boot disk, and the disklabel looks a lot better.

The DOS heritage of i386 hardware is difficult to handle. This makes me
appreciate more the work of the i386 team. 

On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Claude Marinier wrote:
> During upgrade to NetBSD 1.3.3 (i386), soon after the start, when it has
> had a look at the disk, sysinst puts up one of those boxes framed with
> "*". The frame partially obscures a message; the part I can see says:
> 
>     *****ld-NetBSD or FreeBSD. See installboot(8).
>         *
>         *
> 
> This appears to be a reference to the partition ID in the MBR. I checked
> with fdisk. The first three partition are marked as "unused"; the third
> has a sysid of 165 and flag value of 0x80. I believe that this means
> NetBSD/active.
> 
> I can boot the system with the boot code on the sysinst floppy but not
> directly, i.e. when I remove the floppy, the system hangs before booting.
> While booting, the system complains about the sysid just before the first
> kernel messages. I have tried "fdisk -i" and "fdisk -u"; I have also done
> (from /usr/mdec) "installboot biosboot.sym /dev/rwd0a". No progress. I did
> the installboot on the live system, should I do it from a floppy boot?
> 
> What is the correct sysid for NetBSD? I get the impression it has changed.

--------------------
Claude Marinier, Information Technology Group    claude.marinier@dreo.dnd.ca 
Defence Research Establishment Ottawa (DREO)    (613) 998-4901  FAX 998-2675
3701 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario  K1A 0Z4         http://www.dreo.dnd.ca