>Hi - I've just installed the binary distribution of i386 NetBSD 1.2 on a P5,
>EIDE, 16M machine.  (This machine is going to be a 100% NetBSD; I won't be
>sharing it with DOS/Win.)  Booting off the boot floppies I made the file
>systems, installed the kernal, and so on just fine.  The problem is when
>attempting to boot off the hard drive.  Instead of booting I get a "Read
>Error.", so it appears to be a problem with the bootstraping.

O.K. (He said, hoping another solution had been reached), here's my
story dealing with this problem, and its solution:

I bought a Micronics P5-90 motherboard, to replace my 386-40 board, so
I could get into the 90's.

I loaded the system on, feeling elation at the new purchase, and the
obvious speed increase. (Plus I was hyped, because I had the machine
at work, so I could hook it straight to the Internet to get the
remainder of the distribution.)

I got it set-up, to the point that the set-up procedure said, Remove
all floppies and hit any key to reboot.

This I did... <Whirrrr> Read Error

Oh god, what's up? Check all the cables, look at the disklabel, what
the hell???

Reboot using the floppy. Works, AND I can mount wd0a and e. O.K. Must
be something funky with the boot blocks, right?

I replaced them using disklabel. I replaced them using pfdisk. I
replaced them using fdisk from DOS 5 and 6.

Nothing.

Eventually I got disgusted, decided it was maybe a hardware fault, and
sent the motherboard back to Micronics for a fix (my distributor
having since gone belly up). This didn't help.

Then I bought a new drive, having found out the Conner drives occasionally
do weird things.

This was also not the problem.

Fearing for the broken soul syndrome (where you replace every single part in a
machine or computer, down the the case and labels, and it still
doesn't work) I purchase a new motherboard. An Intel Zappa.

Plug in the drives, power supply, monitor, etc. Flip the Switch.

Zoom.

As far as I can tell, the problem was the BIOS. I think I heard of
someone saying that the Phoenix BIOS would report the wrong unit
number at some point during the boot process.

This is vaguely corroborated by the fact that I couldn't get DOS 6.2
to boot either.

(I had to say a prayer over the computer, and fill a small Bill Gates
doll with pins to get the taint away from the poor thing.)

So, I hope you don't have this experience, but I would recommend
trying the drive on a different motherboard if you can.
--
Hacksaw