I built an install set from today's sources.  I had several problems
installing onto a AMD 486/66 with a completely blank disk (2 gig SCSI,
Adaptec 1542B).  I'm not sure whether the problems are i386 specific
or not, so I'm warning everyone...

First, the partition editor appears to have some off-by-one problems
(I'll check the code after I have dinner to see if I can find code
that matches the behavior I saw); basically, I had trouble getting it
to stop complaining that partitions b and e overlapped:

	      size     offset  (Megabytes)
	a	96	0
	b	96	96
	e	1911	192

the partition editor said the b partition ended at 191, but somehow it
still overlapped with an e partition starting at 192...  Once I got a
partitioning that satisfied the overlap check, it then made the file
systems, but crapped out with the following message displayed SO
BRIEFLY that I had to check the sources to find out what it really said:
"There is a big problem!  Can not create /mnt/etc/fstab.  Bailing out!"

It turned out that the root filesystem was evidently junk, even though
mount was able to mount it.  ("ls /mnt" blew out with an error that I
neglected to write down.)

I also think there's a problem in the MBR-writing code (definitely
i386 specific), because I tried this install process twice; first I
used the disk geometry detected by install (4340 cylinders, 8 heads,
126 sectors, or something like that), then with a modified version of
the Adaptec ficticious geometry (701/64/96, each logical cylinder 3
megabytes).  (Oh, hmm, maybe that's what was confusing the partition
editor?  If it was silently rounding partitions to 3MB boundaries
without displaying the real results, that might explain why there was
an overlap that wasn't apparent from the editor display.)

Next, I zeroed the first 32 sectors of the hard drive and started
again, this time not trying a custom partition scheme.  That succeeded
in partitioning the disk and installing the distribution without
complaint; alas, when I rebooted, the BIOS boot halted with the
complaint "No operating system."  I can boot using a floppy, so the
filesystem itself appears to be intact.

As I said, this was a hand-built installation set; I have a set of
binaries ftp'd from netbsd.org, and I will try that.  It might have
been a fouled up build, or it might be some last-minute change to
sysinst or some other utility which is bollixing things up...