I just finished installing NetBSD-1.2 (twice) onto an i386 system.
When the system boots, I simply get the message "read error" in
the upper left corner of an otherwise clear screen!  The floppy
drive light is on and stays that way.

I installed on an HP Vectra XM4 5/133 (Pentium) onto a Quantum 1.2G
EIDE drive.  I had NetBSD use the whole disk (no other partitions).
It boots the floppies fine; it configures the AMD ethernet i/f fine
(le0), mounts the EIDE disk (wd0x) fine for Extracting packages
via NFS.  I did the kernel copy step as indicated.

If I boot the kernel diskette, I can mount the filesystems and poke
around--all looks great.  I can run /mnt/sbin/fdisk and see that
the partition table is as described in fdisk(8):  three empty
partitions and the last one is active and covers the whole disk.

(Last year, I had no trouble at all installing NetBSD 1.1 onto a
similar Vectra (the VL3 5/90), also EIDE, etc.; so I know how to
do this.)

I don't *think* I'm doing anything obvious or dumb ...

Help?  Thanks!

-- 
Bruce M. Walker   |   Visible Genetics Inc.   |   bmw@visgen.com