In message <9601110049.AA20777@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US>you write:
> >  My question:  What am I supposed to do before/while hooking a new drive?
> > Is "pfdisk" the answer for all new drives, even if for NetBSD-only?
> 
> I believe so.  Our PC had a single 2.1 Gb DOS-only disk on it, and I added

I have added several disks to my box without booting DOS (because the machine 
refuses to boot that after initial install).

You can use NetBSD's fdisk to create the Netbsd partition.  You have to enter 
the correct data and you should _never_ believe what fdisk tells you it finds 
on the disklabel.  

These figures were so far out last time I checked:

oskar@zappa (98) > fdisk /dev/rsd0d
******* Working on device /dev/rsd0d *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=2700 heads=9 sectors/track=84 (756 sectors/cylinder)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cylinder 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=2700 heads=9 sectors/track=84 (756 sectors/cylinder)

Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 0 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 1 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
sysid 165 (NetBSD or 386BSD)
    start 0, size 50000 (24 MB), flag 80
        beg: cylinder    0, head   0, sector  1
        end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63
oskar@zappa (99) > dmesg | grep sd0
sd0 at scsibus0: 1006MB, 2700 cyl, 9 head, 84 sec, 512 bytes/sec

Gruesse
       Oskar

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