> if your BIOS doesn't support the disk you're trying to boot from,
> and you're trying to use boot.com to boot, you probably have to
> stuff a copy of netbsd in the MS-DOS file system and boot from
> that instead.  boot.com accepts an MS-DOS file name in addition
> to the normal syntax of the boot code.  (If I'm not much
> mistaken, boot.com accepts the (default) file name to boot from
> as a command line argument.)

Yeah, that is what I ended up doing.  The problem was that the only kernel
I had access to (koth-generic) defaulted to using wd0a as the root 
partition, so when I booted using the -r flag (use the kernel's compiled 
in partitions), I would get a panic when it couldn't find wd0a.  The 
solution was to use a specially compiled kernel (thanks again!) 
compiled with "config netbsd root on sd0a swap on sd0b", or use the -a 
flag (ask which partition to use).

I would suggest that some of the more useful boot flags (at least -a) be 
listed in the INSTALL docs.


> I saw a complaint that boot.com could only load smaller kernels.
> I'll try to investigate this further and hopefully return with
> more information later.

The specially compiled generic kernel was 1.3Mb, and boot.com worked fine
with it.  I can't imagine compiling a kernel bigger than that! 


Jeff Thieleke