So. Having presented this to the folks I know directly who have NetBSD
experience, and gotton back "That's odd...", I present for your evaluation
the following problem. Pointers on which TFM to R would be appreciated.

New installation on an ABIT BP-6 dual Celeron MB, both slots with Intel
Celeron 400s, upgraded to the lastest official BIOS (version RU) to get
support for extended INT13.

One 40g Western Digital IDE HD, Primary/Master; one old Samsung CD-ROM,
Secondary/Master.

Two BIOS partitions (0 and 1), both id 169 (NetBSD). fdisk sees these and
displays them just fine.

Partition 0 is 10g, set active, and has a disklabel and NetBSD filesystems
(a = /, b = 512M swap, c&d standard, no others)

Partition 1 has not yet been set up in any way, other than it's existance
in the BIOS partition table, and has the other ~30g of the drive.

Base install 1.5.1, upgraded to CVS branch netbsd-1-6, complete rebuild
and install of kernel and userland according to "Tracking NetBSD-current".

fdisk -i -c /usr/mdec/mbr_bootsel (configured to boot partition 0 after
10 seconds, has an named option for partition 1 as well)

/usr/mdec/installboot /usr/mdec/biosboot.sym /dev/rwd0a

Upon reboot, the boot selector runs, expires the 10 second timer, and at
that point prints a "3" on the next line, then hangs.

Booting from the install CD, interrupting the auto-boot, and entering
"boot wd0a:/netbsd" works just fine, for both the old and new kernels
(which is how it got to it's current state of having a 1.6F kernel/userland
installed).
-- 
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker                           System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com              http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/