I'm trying to install 1.3.3 on a gift laptop. The laptop is a dell
latitude 450 xp with 23M of ram. It had a dos system, but I had sysinst
take the entire drive for netbsd's use.

Booting from the floppy takes an incredibly long time. After reading
the floppy, the kernel detects the cpu, memory, bus, and ports. All of
this is done at a fair pace (no more than 10 seconds) The kernel then
detects the hard drive at wd0, finds the geometry and size of drive,
and freezes for about 5 minutes. Then a line about npx0 at a port using
exception 16 and the rest of the boot process (about 10 seconds again).
This happens if I boot off of the installed kernel as well.

What is going on?

During the install process, I think newfs reports ``the disk to be old
NetBSD or FreeBSD -- see installboot(8).'' Going to the the netbsd man
pages on the web, installboot(8) doesn't seem to have relevent
information. A general web search didn't find anything useful, and a
half-hearted search through the i386-port archives didn't help either.

WL