Has anyone done this successfully?

I managed to put a NetBSD disklabel on IDE partition 2 with Linux's
fdisk program (which can manipulate BSD disklabels).  After booting
into NetBSD, I can look at the disklabel with /sbin/disklabel.
However, when I then try to newfs one of the BSD partitions, I get
told "open: Device not configured".  Am I going about this totally
wrong?

The reason I want to do this is because I would like to dual boot this
disk with Linux and NetBSD, which requires both bootable filesystems
to be on cylinders < 1024.  I wanted to avoid having non-consecutive
IDE partitions.  The only solution seemed to be to have Linux's root
disk on IDE partition 1, NetBSD disk space to be on partition 2, and
the rest of Linux's disk space on partitions 3 and 4.  However, I am
thwarted by NetBSD's expectation that its disklabel will be on
partition 4.

Feel free to beat me savagely about the head and shoulders with a clue
stick if I'm missing something obvious, but I'm stumped here.

-- 
Mirian Crzig Lennox                                Systems Anarchist
          "There's a New World Order coming every minute.
                      Make mine extra cheese."