I have had this problem (or similar) before with this machine, but 
foolish me can't remember the solution I was told, and I can't find it 
in any archives. Searching for other hints gave a few ideas, but nothing 
that really helped. Apologies for probably being a fool twice.

Anyway, in order to juggle around with some data, I have put a Maxtor 
DiamondMax 60 GB disk in a K6-2 450 MHz machine (Acorp 5ALI61 rev F 
motherboard.) Eventually I will decommission this bloody machine, but 
for now, I have to use it.

The disk used to be one half of a (RaidFrame) RAID-1 set (from another 
machine, which is dead now), but I have cleared it with dd </dev/zero 
 >/dev/rwd0d just to be completely sure it is blank.

I boot from a NetBSD4_BETA CD from some time in September, all is fine, 
I partition and install, all goes well. But when I try to boot, I get an 
"error no operating system". If I try using mbr_bootsel, I get "error 
3". When I interrupt boot from the cd and try to "boot hd0a:netbsd" it 
doesn't work either. Booting from the CD, going into a shell and 
mounting /dev/wd0a works fine. Everything is there.

I have tried "mount /dev/wd0a /mnt ; mount /dev/wd0e /mnt/usr ; chroot 
/mnt ; installboot -v -o timeout=5 /dev/rwd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1", 
so as far as I know, the boot loader (?) should be in the right place.

I have tried to reinstall boot blocks with "fdisk -ic /usr/mdec/mbr" and 
also mbr_bootsel and mbr_ext. Except for some variation in the error 
message, it still won't boot.

If I use fdisk to install mbr_ext, the message I get is "Fn: 
diskn\nError Not a bootxx image".

**The BIOS harddisk detection detects the disk and uses LBA mode. All 
*should* work just fine. I am sure I could just install Linux and it 
will work. But why won't NetBSD work?

When I do the installation I do the absolute minimum: I partition using 
the entire disk for NetBSD, 2048 MB for /, 512 MB for swap, 1024+ for 
/usr, and 512 MB for /var.
Full installation, from NFS. FFSv1 filesystems. Everything as much as 
possible default, I just adjust the sizes. Why doesn't the machine boot?

I have also tried using an old NetBSD 3.0 CD, same difference.

What's wrong with my stupid machine, since NetBSD won't install properly 
on it? Or - more likely - what trivial little bit is it that *I* am 
doing wrong?

HELP, please!

-Lasse