Excerpts from netbsd: 14-Aug-97 Re: Saga of the Gateway P4D.. Patrick
Welche@cam.ac.uk (777*)

> If all you want is a disk which just has NetBSD on it, you don't need
> to worry about creating extra small partitions with pfdisk etc.
> [...]
> (I keep emphasizing as everyone seems to say you
> need a small dos partition on it to mystically make it work)

In principle, you are right, but...

I have 2 machines which even hang early in the BIOS, when the
IDE disks are detected, if there is a partition with offset 0
in the MBR partition table. Leaving 1 track free helped.
In my experience, there is no need to fill the space with a
DOS partition.
A boot selector might help if the BIOS doesn't pass the
boot device number properly.

best regards
Matthias