I had the EXACT SAME problem.
     
     now for the bad part....
     
     I still don't have netbsd on that machine.
     
     Sorry.   If you have any success, let me know what you did.
     
     FYI:  Nobody could tell me what the message means.  


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: 
Author:  "Eric S. Hvozda" <hvozda@netcom.com> at smtp
Date:    10/19/95 18:09


Recently I got a new machine at a work site.  It's a gateway 2000 
P5-133 with a WDC AC31600H (1.5Gb EIDE) disk.  I want to get NetBSD
on it now (1.1 will get here soon enough).  So I whip out my all purpose 
1.0 kc-aha kernel copy floppy and boot up after making the proper 
partitions with pfdisk.
     
Low and behold, after it announced wdc0 and wd0 (it does show the 
geo and mfg of the disk) I see:
     
wd0: wdcontrol: geometry failed: status 0 error 0
     
and the machine just hangs.
     
Now I see mail in the archives on netbsd-help and current users about this.
     
current-users seemed to on a different bend of things, but mail 
found in:
     
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/mailing-lists/netbsd-help/netbsd-help.0051
     
seems to expound the same exact problem.  I don't see answers offered up 
there tho.  Anyone seen this since then and dealt with it?  I'll even 
take hints at this point :-)