This may sound like a silly question, but how do you make a disk
bootable under the i386 port?  I know I've done this before, and I am
almost positive I'm doing the right thing, but it doesn't work.

I've got a 386 with an IDE disk (1001 cyl; no geometry translation)
that I want to devote entirely to NetBSD.  This is the only disk in
the machine, so it should work.  I create a disktab entry in which
partitions c and d both occupy the entire disk, and then I make a, b,
e, and f appropriately for my needs (all on cylinder boundaries;
nothing weird there).  Then I do a "disklabel -w -B wd0 st1144at"
(that's the name of my disktab entry), and I verify that the label was
written correctly with a "disklabel -r wd0".  No asterisks show up on
the right hand side or anything that could possibly indicate an error
or problem.

When I reboot, all I get is the message "Read error".  From poking
around, I'm guessing that this is coming from the primary bootstrap; I
also know that the primary bootstrap is getting written to sector 0
because I can use dd to read that sector.  However, I don't know
enough about the disk layout to find where the secondary bootstrap
code would be at.

FWIW, I've tried many permutations of various ideas I've had, in
addition to the above.  I've tried making partition c start on
cylinder 1 instead of cylinder 0, resizing other partitions
appropriately, and installing os-bs.  I've tried all kinds of
different sizes for partitions, and there are some other things I've
tried that I don't remember right now.

Oh -- I almost forgot.  I'm using NetBSD/i386 1.2 from the snapshot on
ftp.netbsd.org.

TIA for any help.

Chris

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Jones                                      cjones@rupert.oscs.montana.edu
           Mad scientist in training...
"Is this going to be a stand-up programming session, sir, or another bug hunt?"