Okay, I'm glad to have helped you find the problem.  Just a quick recap,
in case I was unclear before, and to keep things straight in my own head:

This is with an ahc1 SCSI controller, attached to a disk with 1980c, 15t,
80s.  It's a Pentium-133, with a somewhat recent BIOS:

1) When I zero out the first meg or so of the disk (with dd from the
NetBSD boot floppy), and then run Win95's fdisk and format, the disk is
bootable.  NetBSD's fdisk claims the geometry is 149c, 255t, 63s.

2) When I install NetBSD directly over the top of the setup in 1), sysinst
gets the MBR geometry and sets stuff up.  I tell it to use the entire disk
for itself.  But the hard disk is not bootable, for whatever reason.  

3) If I re-run sysinst and tell it that the BIOS thinks the geometry is
1024c, 16h, 63s, then it installs just fine and makes the disk bootable.


Let me know if you want me to test out anything else with this system.

Chris

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Jones                                      cjones@rupert.oscs.montana.edu
           Mad scientist in training...
"Is this going to be a stand-up programming session, sir, or another bug hunt?"