Excerpts from netbsd: 26-May-98 Partition troubles Gunnar
Helliesen@bitcon. (3711*)

> When I run fdisk(8) it seems to have a weird notion of my partition
> layout:
> [...]
> 3: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
>     start 0, size 50000 (24 MB), flag 0x80
>         beg: cylinder    0, head   0, sector  1
>         end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63

This is a fake partition table as installed by "fdisk"
or "installboot". If you use the whole disk for NetBSD
this is OK - "start 0" in important, the size is ignored.

> # disklabel -r wd0
> disklabel: warning, DOS partition table with no valid NetBSD partition

Are you sure it's a new "disklabel"?

> Or is this some BIOS limitation
> that we need to have DOS partitions in the boot blocks?

Yes, there a some BIOSes which obviously try to interpret
the partition table (and hang if they don't like it).

best regards
Matthias