>Last night I tried the from scratch install to my 486DX33/8mb system.  It work
>ed
>for the most part, until it came time to boot off the hard drive.  It boots
>through the hardware and when it accesses the hard drive prints out 'no
>operating system' and hangs.  Using OS-BS (1.35) I can get it to boot straight
>into dos, but OS-BS also gives the no operating system message if trying to
>boot into NetBSD.
>
>I can boot from the kcbt-10 floppy and then specify sd(0,a)/netbsd at the boot
>prompt.  The system comes up fine and runs without problems (at least for as
>long as I would let it, >2hours).
>
>I figure I've done something stupid here, so does anybody have any words of
>wisdom?

I had the _exact_ same problem after I had used FIPS to partition the drive;
I could boot from a floppy and say sd(0,a)/netbsd, but the BIOS boot stuff
didn't work at all.

It turned out that the block offset for the partition was correct, but the
cyl/sector/head beginning and endings were _not_.  Apparantly the BIOS boot
routines want them all to match up.  Here's the output of fdisk on the home
machine:


******* Working on device /dev/rsd0d *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=991 heads=64 sectors/track=32 (2048 blks/cyl)

parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=991 heads=64 sectors/track=32 (2048 blks/cyl)

Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 0 is:
sysid 6,(Primary 'big' DOS (> 32MB))
    start 32, size 409568 (199 Meg), flag 80
        beg: cyl 0/ sector 1/ head 1;
        end: cyl 199/ sector 32/ head 63
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 165,(NetBSD)
    start 409600, size 1617920 (790 Meg), flag 0
        beg: cyl 200/ sector 1/ head 0;
        end: cyl 989/ sector 32/ head 63

My advice to you is to boot into Unix and use the NetBSD fdisk to see if
the beginning/ending cyl/sec/head geometry matches up with your block and
size offsets.  If it doesn't, then you can use the NetBSD fdisk to bring them
into line.  That fixed the problem for me!

Good luck!  Please feel free to send me private mail if you have more problems.

--Ken