Thanks to the people to emailed to the list or to me about sysid 169.
Using fdisk -i and fdisk -u, I cleaned out the mbr and set the sysid.

As fdisk(8)'s BUGS states, many subtleties are not explained.

Thanks to the people who suggestioned disabling the builtin pointing
device, and disabling the power manager. It seems to help: it sticks on
the wd0 line for about a minute before going on. Is this normal? At
some point, I'd like compile in apm support, but I can live without it
for now.

Thanks for all the help.

WL