continuing the saga, plug the netbsd disk in as wd0, try to boot up...
(btw, had booted into freebsd and mounted / from there, to access to a
 evice which would work for installing stuff - netbsd didn't like where
 any of my netword cards were, etc...)

changing root device to sd0a
panic: init died (signal 0, exit 1)
Stopped at      _Debugger+0x4:  leave
db> t
_Debugger(f8118f1c,,f81108f8,f9a72f24,f7bfddc0,f9a72f38) at _Debugger+0x4
_panic(f81108f8,0,1,f7bfddc0,f873ff00) at _panic+0x3b
_exit1(f873ff00,100,f9a72fa8,f81ce631,f873ff00) at _exit+0x27
_sys_exit(f873ff00,f9a72ff88,f9a72f80,0,0) at _sys_exit+0x14
_syscall() at _syscall+0x229
--- syscall (number 1) ---
0x14bff:
db> ps
shows init, swapper and pagedaemon.

blah...installing netbsd without a scsi card sux.