Summary: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> recommended that I "Use The 
Source" to fix fdisk and submit a patch.   Antti Kantee <pooka@iki.fi> offered 
a suggestion that used /dev/zero that I didn't understand.   Jonathan Stone 
<jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU> stuck up for me, saying that it isn't fair to 
expect an ordinary user to understand and fix fdisk.

Well, I'm only sometimes an ordinary user.  I'm not as heavily into NetBSD as 
Perry or Ken (kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil), but once in a while I get to wear a 
Superhero Costume.  I guess I was just frustrated and a lot concerned that I'd 
done some real damage in my ignorance.

I undid my mistake by hacking fdisk slightly.  I'll submit a patch.  
Meanwhile, in case anyone is interested, fdisk's main() always calls a 
intuit_translated_geometry().  It shouldn't do that if the -b option is part 
of the command line.  That's my simple fix.

David Talmage
who is sometimes clever enough