> The solution:
> 
> - Make sure you have a MBR on the disk with partition type 165.  I'm not

Are you sure it's 165 (old netbsd) not 169 (netbsd)?

>   kidding.  (Incidentally, fdisk should probably be enabled for arm32.)

Hmm, I've hacked up a version of fdisk -- -current has renamed all the dos 
structures to mbr_ and equivalent.  Running it seems to give sensible 
information -- the sysid was previously 6 or something quite low.

What should the boot block be set to?  Should it contain the i386 code in 
fdisk.c, or should it be arm code that gets executed?

> - Disklabel it.

Any special options (primary, secondary boot blocks and the like?

> - Bott disk:\netbsd, or hardlink /netbsd to /boot.

This still hangs -- I just get a message 

Boot device: /isa/ide/disk@0:\netbsd  File and args:

and then nothing.  Sometimes I can then break into this with 
CTRL-ALT-BREAK, but not always.

Something I forgot to mention in my first message was that the Aug28 build 
of the firmware does not contain an interrupts property for the ide device 
(I had to fake this up in the ofw probing code using the constant defined 
in the headers -- I'll submit a patch once I get all this sorted out).  
Could this be related to why I can't access the disk ?  Can I patch my 
firmware to supply this info?

Is there any way I can get the open firmware to print what it can see of 
the partition table?  I really don't know any Forth at all, so wouldn't 
know where to start.

Thanks for your help anyway

Richard.