>
> I'm fairly new to *nix, and very new to NetBSD. I've installed NetBSD 1.5.2 on my Toshiba T1950 (486SX-25, 12Mb ram, 202Mb hd) over FTP. The installation went smoothly, except when I rebooted the first time. At this point I was greeted with a message that the system could not boot in multi user mode, only single user mode.
please don't send mails with such long lines.

>
> After reading further (yes, I RTFM, hopefully I didn't miss the solution), I realized I had forgotten to change the rc.conf file to 'rc_configured=YES' and 'wscons=YES'.
> I thought it would be trivial to make the changes (silly Dan). When I
>tried to "vi /etc/rc.conf", I discovered the hard drive was mounted in
>read only mode. I cannot make any changes to any files. So, I'm stuck in
>the old Catch 22; to boot properly, I have to change rc.conf, but to
>change rc.conf, I have to boot properly.
>
> Here are the things I will try tonight, in this order:
>
>> At the command prompt, enter "mount -u /" to mount all file systems
>(i.e. the hard drive in this case) as read/write. Then make the changes.
>If this does not work....

it will work if you have proper /etc/fstab .
if you haven't use

mount -w /dev/wd0a /

and then edit /etc/fstab and /etc/rc.conf etc...
then just press CTRL-D - don't reboot!