I believe the Mac-based netbsd installer tool only supports partition sizes
less than 512 Mbytes. At least, that was my experience - I got the same
error from the installer as you until I reduced the partition size to less
than 512 Mbytes. T

o cope with the smaller size filesystems, I set up three partitions: root,
/usr, and /Users (to match Mac OS X pratice - normal unix pratice would name
this /users or /home). I made all three partitions using a Mac disk
partitioning tool. I mkfs'd the root and /usr partition using the Mac
installer tool, but waited until the system was up and running and used the
netbsd newfs command to make the (large) /Users filesystem.

I think the complaints about ficticious geometry are harmless. My guess is
that your kernel panics are a result of a trashed filesystem due to the
inabilty of the Mac installer to handle your large netbsd partition size.

Regards,
-Steve

Steve Byan <smb@world.std.com>