I always use BIOS BOOT PARTITIONS.  I'm pretty sure that I've run
into the same sort of problem.  I typically use boot floppies from
-current, to install 1.3 systems.  There was a period there when 
that wouldn't work and I had to do a installboot once the 1.3 
/usr/mdec was copied onto the disk.

Now there was a time that installboot was broken and did not work with
-current even.  But I'm pretty sure that was fixed.

Michael Graff <explorer@flame.org> writes:

> Wolfgang Rupprecht <wolfgang@wsrcc.com> writes:
> 
> > I recently "upgraded", the >6mo old bootblocks on an IDE based
> > netbsd-current system without bios partition via:
> > 
> > 	/usr/mdec/installboot -v /usr/mdec/biosboot.sym /dev/rwd0a
> > 
> > The system now hangs at first-stage boot time.  Booting from floppy
> > and then manually selecting "boot wd0a:" works just fine.  Something
> > broke in the recent boot code (or perhaps in installboot???).
> > 
> > Anyone know what changed???
> 
> This is what I did to a SCSI disk from the current 1.3.x branch, and
> lost in the same way.
> 
> --Michael