In Message <199709080147.VAA20306@ghost.whirlpool.com> ,
   Andrew Gillham <gillhaa@ghost.whirlpool.com> wrote:

=>>    Ok, well, it is 100% NetBSD. I only loaded OS-BS because I thought
=>> it would help since I don't actually have DOS fdisk to write the MBR.
=>> I just want the stupid thing to boot...
=>
=>I believe I have installed NetBSD on a disk that I zero'd with dd.
=>You shouldn't need a MBR from MSDOS inorder to use NetBSD.  If you
=>really need one, and don't have DOS, FreeDOS might have an MBR you
=>could use.  Perhaps your current MBR is hosed, so zeroing it out
=>might help.  'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0d bs=512b count=1'

   No good. Did the above, redisklabeled, reinstallbooted, and
tried to reboot, but the BIOS says "No Boot Record Found on SCSI".
   Ok, I finally worked it out. I had to tell fdisk that my NetBSD
partition starts at my 'a' (root) partition, then set my 'c'
partition in the disklabel to point to start at the 'a' partition.
Redisklabel, reinstallboot on /dev/rsd0a, and it boots no problem.
Worked it out mostly from reading source comments. Perhaps this
should make it into an i386-specific part of the disklabel, fdisk,
and/or installboot manpage(s). You can almost piece this together
from the "prep" note in the distrib area, but not quite.

                                      Gary D. Duzan
                         Humble Practitioner of the Computing Arts


p.s. There's gotta be a better way...