> > What am I missing?  Even if the bios is messed up so that it boots
> > the 2nd drive, why doesn't the NetBSD boot selector switch to
> > disk one when I press F1?
> 
> Some bioses shuffle around the reported disks (and the bootloader relies on
> the bios completely). My bios, for example, won't report the third disk if
> I use the bios raid feature on the first two - so there is no way for the
> NetBSD bootloader to access the disk. When I turn of the raid feature, I see
> the third and one of the first two disks, the third becoming the 0x80 drive.

Thanks.

I think the bios was ignoring the first disk altogether (I would call this a bug)
and probably was returning an error to the NetBSD boot selector which then
printed "Error ?".

I found a "load previous" option on the "advanced cmos" page, and it is working
again.