Thanx for all input, even though I do not feel clear about things,
things are much more clear now than a couple of days ago.

I'll present my solutions first, and then I have a couple of questions.
I'll also mention some of my steps trying to solve this problem.

First: My solutions

Hanging OS after disklabel
---------------------------
I managed to wipe the disk by using the Linux boot-disks, I both used
fdisk and the dd command to make this work, I don't know which was
causing the success, but now I am able to use disklabel on the disk
using the NetBSD boot-floppy (and probably by booting the OS from wd0, =
I
haven't tried it yet).

There should be a NetBSD tool (or at least a NetBSD distributed tool)
for zapping the disklabel area of the disk to fix this kind of =
problems.

XSM crashing
------------
As the title says, I have also had problems with this. There is
obviously a problem with xsm which make it crash when it can't
reverse-lookup the client (or maybe itself?). The machine isn't fully
configured yet, and without a correctly configured resolv.conf xsm
crashes.

This is a bug in xsm. Should I make a problem report to NetBSD about
this, or is it an XFree problem? It should definitely not crash with a
core dump, if it can't run it should at least report it in
.xsession-errors and die.

Some Questions
--------------
Now I have an empty disk which I intend to configure for use for =
NetBSD.
I want to use all of the disk as one partition, and mount it as a data
disk for my Windows machines and for the pmax running NetBSD.

How should I disklabel this disk? I am confused, but it seems to me the
correct thing to do is this:

a: Start at sector 63, end at sector 6281856, type 4.2BSD
c: Start at sector 0, end at sector 6281856, type unused
d: Start at sector 0, end at sector 6281856, type unused

All other partition not defined at all.

Any comments?


Problem solving steps (disklabel problems)
------------------------------------------
Some of the things I did which all ended with the same NetBSD hang:

- DOS Fdisk, format + some normal use of the disk
- Move the disk to primary, use of DOS FDISK /MBR
- Boot NetBSD floppy try to do a dd (on any partition on wd0=20
  [old wd1])
- Boot NetBSD floppy use disklabel or NetBSD fdisk.
- Using incorrect disk geometry in BIOS, new DOS FDISK /MBR /=20
  FDISK / FORMAT
- Move the disk to a newer machine with support for large disks,
  then using NetBSD floppy with disklabel/fdisk/dd
- FDISK /MBR / FDISK / FORMAT on this other machine

Any access on this disk on NetBSD hung NetBSD, low- or high-level.

The success came when I dd'ed and fdisk'ed the disk on this=20
other machine using Linux boot-diskette.

I had problems using dd if=3D/dev/zero of=3D/dev/hdb [...], it=20
wrote nothing on the disk, i used dd if=3D/bin/tar of=3D/dev/hdb [...]
on Linux.

Thanks for all help and hints.

I'll now continue my NetBSD quest for fire. I believe I'll have
more questions for you soon ;-)

Regards,=20

Harald Bjor=F8y
Bergen IT Consult AS
http://www.bitcon.no/