I have discovered part of the issue and/or another problem: the process of 
attempting to upgrade my NetBSD installation has b0rked up the FreeBSD 
installation sitting on a primary partition next door.

I discovered this by going into a fresh install far enough to see where I 
was being prompted to install NetBSD. To my surprise, two partitions were 
now marked by the installer as being of type NetBSD: the primary one where 
FreeBSD had been (this was the one it was defaulting to) and the logical 
one where I'd been booting NetBSD 3.x.

IIRC, I have been through this before but it has been a long time. Now I 
have two OSs I cannot boot into. I'm loath to blame the machine and / or 
installer, since I'm sure they're both smarter than I am, but I wish I 
knew where I went wrong.

GB

+-----------------------------------------------------+
Glenn Becker - burningc@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
+-----------------------------------------------------+