first, i'd like to thank everyone that has attempted to help with this
problem.  i've still not gotten NetBSD to boot, but i now have more
information on the problem and details about my system.  to quickly
recap, i'm trying to install the 386 port of NetBSD 1.1 on my system,
on a 1gb EIDE disk shared with dos.  i'm using os-bs as a boot
manager.  booting from floppy and the initial installation process
ocurred without incident.  i then copied the kernel to the hard drive,
and tried to boot from it to install the distribution sets (i only
have one 3.5" drive), and the boot stalled after hitting return at the
boot prompt (there appeared to be no disk activity).  at the
suggestion of folks from this list, i've tried the following:

	1) boot from floppy, but specify wd(0,a)/netbsd at boot prompt.
	   gets same result as booting directly from hard drive.

	2) boot from hard drive, but specify fd(0,a)/netbsd at boot 
           prompt.  this works.

	3) boot from floppy, then mount /mnt.  this succeeded, and i
	   was able to successfully look around in the root partition.
	   things looked reasonable, and the kernel copy appeared to
	   have been successful.

the problem almost certainly has something to do with my disk drive
and controller setup.  here are the details:

	o 1gb EIDE drive.
	
	o in-board primary IDE controller.  this controller itself 
	  cannot handle seek commands to cylinders greater than 1024.
	  it also cannot be disabled or made a secondary controller.

	o secondary EIDE controller with on-board BIOS.  while there
	  are no drives attached to this controller, its BIOS supercedes
	  the system BIOS.  at boot time, it is remapped into upper memory
          at D000-DBFF and it translates the geometry of the drive to
	  527,64,63 from 2114,16,63.  the BIOS controls both controllers,
	  and translates all requests from L-CHS to LBA.  apparently,
	  the secondary controller actually issues the LBA format commands
	  to the drive.

given the above, what happens once NetBSD's device drivers take over?
does any of this LBA translation take place?  does the secondary 
controller's BIOS have any control any longer?  if not, which controller
is issuing commands to the drive and in what format (NetBSD was informed
of the new geometry during installation)?

does anybody have any idea what might be happening here? 

thanks.

tony