My brother-in-law and I just installed NetBSD on his machine, and I
made some notes as I went along.  We used the boot disks from the
latest snapshot-19990315.

Unfortunately, our first attempt newfs'd his NT partition.  Strangely,
he didn't seem too phased by that ;-)

For the most part we just accepted the defaults that sysinst gave us.
We chose that we wanted to install on part of the disk (instead of all
of it) and the default disklabel that it gave us apparently was for a
full disk install.  We had originally selected that we wanted
cylinders reported and somehow it switched back to using megabytes.
We were a little confused by the numbers being different than we
expected but we assumed (incorrectly) that sysinst knew what it was
doing.  We proceeded to do the install, and quickly destroyed the NT
partition (it happened to be the first one on the disk).

We verified that his other three partitions were still untouched,
including the one where we actually wanted to install NetBSD.

On our second attempt, we inspected everything that sysinst told us.
That was when we discovered the megabyte/cylinder default switching.
Since we had already blown away the first partition (NT) we decided to
install on the first partition this time.  We chose the "megabyte"
disklabel reporting option and started seeing some consistent numbers.
Again we choose a partial disk install.  When the default disklabel
came up, we finally understood it was still trying to make a "complete
disk" disklabel.  We shrunk the size of the /usr partition to fit
within the bounds of the old NT partition, and then the install ran
much better!

The only other complaint I have, is that the ftp method could be made
easier to use.  First, the default directory didn't point to the
snapshot binary sets, but I guess that might normal when it's not a
formal release.  Having to hit a key after each successful ftp
transfer was a pain.  Unfortunately, on one of the final X tar files,
the ftp server we were using seized up.  I had to abort the transfer.
I went back into sysinst to switch to a different ftp host and try to
finish ftping, but it failed the mount tests because /mnt and /mnt/usr
were already mounted.  I unmounted them and tried again.  It passed
the mount tests, but then proceeded to download ALL of the tar files
from scratch!  I had hoped that it would resume where it left off...

Eventually, I managed to get all the tar files and untar them.

I got the message that I'd have to edit rc.conf to change
rc_configured=NO.  Does a normal successful install do the same or does
it actually setup rc.conf for you?  (I've only done a couple installs
lately and never had a completely successful, uninterupted install, so
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen...)

All this being said, I still think that this sysinst is much better
than the last one I used (early December sometime).  

I'm not complaining - I'm giving feedback ;-)

Cheers,
Dean.