> No, this is not necessary. I currently have ten NetBSD drives
> nearby, few of which which have ever had DOS or Windows95 lay their
> creepy little hands on them. :-) If it's a new drive, you can just
> `disklabel -r -R sd0 protofile' (or whatever options you find
> appropriate) and forget about a DOS partition table altogether.
> Life is much, much easier this way.

 Life should be that easy, yes :-)

 Ok, here is my error again: All i did was inserting a fresh, new and virgin 
hard drive (SCSI) into my sytem, already running NetBSD on another drive.

 Booting and starting disklabel -e sd1 was what I did then. Creating partitions
and then saving resulted into sort of error, but the disklabel was "written".

 All options for disklabel resulted into this error:

disklabel: warning, DOS partition table with no valid NetBSD partition
disklabel: no disk label                                              

 Nontheless, the label was written and usuable - until next boot, where
everything vanished. I was able to "resurect" the drive, because I luckily
wrote the output of disklabel to a file and using this reanimated the
drives.

 For me it still looks like I have to use pfdisk...