Configuration: A 486 PC with two IDE (Maxtor) hard disks, 500 and 100 
megs respectively, a single 1.44M floppy drive, and extraneous equipment 
(CD-ROM drive, etc) none of which I intend to involve in the installation.
 
My 500M hard disk is currently filled with a single 100 meg DOS partition 
and two ext2fs Linux partitions. Nothing on the 500M hard drive is 
critical, so I intend to overwrite everything except DOS if at all possible.
 
The 100M hard disk is currently an ext2fs Linux partition, but I intend 
to erase it in the installation process.

Question: I'm downloading the current binary distribution (1.0A) from 
netbsd.org onto my 100M drive. My current configuration seems to be 
prohibitive (as is my financial situation...) towards installing the 
entire operating system via floppy disk, as I only have one drive and the 
documentation seems to indicate that NetBSD requires two to install from.

What I'd LIKE to do is find a way to extract the sets from my 100M hard 
disk. Nothing in the installation documentations explains exactly how one 
would go about doing this. I've read all the archived posts on the 
tech-install list and have gotten some vague assistance, but I'm still 
unsure of exactly what I need to do in order to install from a hard drive.

Booting solely from the installation floppies, is there a way I can get 
NetBSD to recognize an MS-DOS partition on the 100M drive? Exactly what 
do I need to do to make this work? I know the geometry for the disk in 
question (and am aware of the track/sector conventions involved), but the 
only information I could glean from current postings involved the usage 
of the disklabel command (the man page for which gave no information as 
to how this command would facilitate mounting a hard drive) and the 
disktab file.

Any information you could give me as to how to get the installation media 
to recognize already-existing partitions on a hard drive would be 
appreciated. I am fairly confident that I know everything else I'll need 
to know once I can get the DOS filesystem mounted.

I noticed (as I mentioned before) that the INSTALL document doesn't 
mention anything about this procedure. I'm sure you're all probably aware 
that installing off of a hard drive is the FIRST option you want to look 
at if you're installing an OS off the net... floppies are a pain. Linux 
documents the procedure fairly well, and I remember FreeBSD outlining it 
as well. You'd eliminate quite a few redundant questions from this list 
if detailed partitioning and installation instructions were included with 
the INSTALL document.

In any case, I'd be more than happy to write up a summary of how this is 
done, as long as I'm given enough information to do so. I'm fairly 
disgusted by Linux, so it'd make ME feel better to see fewer users put 
off by installation difficulties and pointed towards Linux. =)

I'm really eager to get started coding under NetBSD, so any tips would be 
GREATLY appreciated. THanks for you're time.
 
Peace.
 
As.