Excerpts from netbsd: 15-Aug-97 Re: Error C:0 H:0 S:0 Andrew
Brown@daemon.org (1087*)

> actually...how old is the boot floppy?  ie, is it a stock 1.2 or 1.2.1
> boot floppy, or is the kernel of a recent enough build that it can
> actually not be taking advantage of the bug that was fixed a few
> months ago (by thorpej if memory serves) where it did not actually
> seem to be waiting for the transfer to take place?

Even if the original problem is solved:
Your memory works well. There is a change to the floppy driver
from november last year (by thorpej indeed) which fixed this.
(I had to scan the source change entries to find it.)
However, the boot code uses the BIOS, and doesn't care about
hardware timing.
As Mike Long mentioned before, the kernel shouldn't be located
at sector 0, so the drive must have read bad data (perhaps all
zeros) at a point before.

best regards
Matthias