I added the msdos partition using Todd's help (and the help of the FAQ at:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/i386/faq.html#msdos_partition ).
At the point of finding the Dist.. sets I :
	hit CTRL-z 
	executed fdisk to get the drive info (it sees the DOS partition)
	EDITOR=vi;export EDITOR # to use vi instead of ed for next step
	disklabel -e wd0

I added partition e: according to the simple instructions in the FAQ.

After saving and executing 'fg' to resume the sysinst,
I specified unmounted filesystem and used 
	Device: wd0e
	Filesystem: msdos
	Directory: /

And now I'm watching "Status: Running / Command: pax...base.tgz"
(I said "no" to display each filename, as I assumed it would only slow things
down and I wouldn't know what to look for, anyway ;) ).

"Unpacked Succesfully"!

"Making device files"!

"The installation of NetBSD-1.4U is now complete. ..."  Yea!

OK...back to the install guide to see if I need to do something else before
fininshing. This is great, everyone. Thanks!

 On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, Robert J Taylor wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, Todd Whitesel wrote:
> > > And I cannot seem to use "unmounted fs" or "local dir"
> > ...
> > >> At this point I'm confused. How do I access the DOS partition? That's where
> > > my distribution sets are.
> > 
> > At this month's South Bay Area NetBSD User's Group Meeting (actually, five of
> > us at a Round Table Pizza), we helped Mike Cheponis install his PC laptop and
> > it was a lot like this: no network, tgz files on MS-DOS partition.
> > 
> > It was nasty. We had to determine the correct numbers for the MS-DOS partition
> > and then suspend (control-Z) sysinst at about the point where you got stuck.
> > Then we used "disklabel -e" to add a partition to the BSD part of the disk
> > so that "mount -t msdos /dev/wd0f /mnt2" would work. (This invokes 'ed' which
> > fortunately, Erik Berls remembered how to use 'blind' without any man pages
> > whatsoever.)
> > 
> 
> Ok, at the prompt type 
> #EDITOR=vi
> #export EDITOR
> 
> and now disklabel -e uses vi. ;)
> 
> > Once we had the new partition in the disklabel, we used "fg" to get back into
> > sysinst and used "unmounted fs" to proceed, and it finished without incident.
> > 
> > So while it is certainly possible, it is definitely not for the faint of heart.
> > 
> > Since the process is actually very straightforward for C code, there really
> > is no reason why sysinst could not have an option to mark certain MS-DOS
> > partitions so that matching partitions will be added to the NetBSD disklabel.
> > It also would help lots of newbies on PC's, because one of the first questions
> > they ask is "how do I mount my FAT partitions?"
> > 
> > Todd Whitesel
> > toddpw @ best.com
> 
> Robert Taylor