Hi,
I'm running 5.0.1 on Amiga and wanted to upgrade to 5.1. So I transferred miniroot.fs to the swap partition using dd and rebooted from it. I enter "netbsd -b" at the bootloader prompt, but after a few moments, I get a message:
While this doesn't directly address your immediate problem, you can upgrade by untargzipping the 5.1 kernel, rebooting, then untargzipping all of the other sets except etc.tgz (so you don't blow away your configuration files).
JOhn