Hi,

first I have to thank you all for the many replies and
suggestions I received.

The problem is now solved, and the solution was not at all what I
had expected.

A colleague of mine took a look at the booting behaviour, and
noticed that he had seen a similar behaviour on another PC.  The
symptoms were that the first-stage boot loader (the 512 bytes in
sector 0 of the NetBSD portion of the disk, if I'm not totally
off my mark) is loaded and started but it ends up jumping into
nowhere-land and the machine resets.

The problem appears to be that the BIOS is not telling the
first-stage boot loader the truth about which disk it was booted
from (!).  He installed a boot loader where the "booted-from
disk" is hardwired to "first hard disk", and "voila", it all
worked as it should.  The OS was then reinstalled with 8k/1k file
system allocation, with NetBSD disklabel geometry of 16h/63s and
with 255h/63s as the BIOS geometry.

Someone hinted that I could use the geometry printed by NetBSD
when it boots in the NetBSD disklabel.  Well, the kernel I'm
using, which is from late-July vintage says:

wdc0 at isa0 port 0x1f0-0x1f7 irq 14
atapibus0 at wdc0
wd0 at wdc0 drive 0: <IBM-DTTA-351680>
wd0: using 16-sector 16-bit pio transfers, lba mode
wd0: 16124MB, 33022080 sec, 512 bytes/sec

for the disk, so it doesn't really tell me the "real" geometry of
the disk. (Hah!  As if it could...)  Not that I need to know
either...

Thanks again, I've now calmed down.  For a while there I wondered
whether I'd just "lost my touch".


- H=E5vard