> when it starts to boot during install, 'dmesg' reports good values for 
> cylinders/heads/sectors...but during the setup, netbsd claims it cannot 
> determine these.

define 'good'!
There are two separate sets of CHS values:
- those reported by the disk
- those reported by the BIOS

In order for the boot process to work properly the BIOS values must be
correct.  Typically these will be 63 sectors, 15 or 16 heads and a maximum
of 1024 cylinders.

> So I used them anyways, sliced up the disk (netbsd is the only thing on it) 
> and then continued with a full install (minus and X stuff).
> 
> It finished and then I tried to reboot.....
> 
> 'no operating system found'

Ok that one comes from the mbr (sector 0) code and means it failed
to find the aa55 magic number at the end of the first sector read
from a partition.

Possibly something forgot to run /usr/mdec/installboot, but I'd
bet on something else being wrong.
Maybe you failed to put the root filesystem at the start of the
netbsd partition?

Boot from the install CD and (I beleive) type ^Z to suspend the
installer.  This should give you a shell prompt.

You should be able to run 'fdisk' and 'disklabel', what do they say?

(the output of 'sysctl machdep.diskinfo' would be useful, but you
almost certainly don't have a recent enough copy of sysctl.)

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk