Mike Cheponis writes:
> Hi, I have a VIA VA503+ motherboard with AMD K6-2-400 and 128 MB SDRAM, with
> the very latest BIOS flashed into the motherboard.

What is the date on the BIOS?  If it is from early this year, or older, it
probably can't handle such a large drive. 

> The disk is 45.0G WD Caviar 450AA, a standard IDE disk.  No matter what I 
> seem to do to the VIA Award BIOS settings, I can't get it to recognize the
> disk (it is configured as Primary Master).

So you tried something like "User mode, 16383, 16, 63" already?

> However, when I power-cycle the machine, since (for whatever reason) the BIOS
> does not recognize this drive, it never boots NetBSD!
> 
> Has anybody seen this before, and have some suggestions?

Well, worst case you could make a bootable floppy with your kernel on it.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to resurrect the non-BIOS boot code for
winchester drives.  So if an attempt to boot via the BIOS fails, the first
"wd" could be booted.  This way it would be possible to boot from a device
with no BIOS support, without having the kernel on the floppy, etc.
This might be useful if anyone ever tries to add NetBSD support to OpenBIOS.

-Andrew