I've never upgraded NetBSD on the i386 port before, and I went into it 
hoping it would be similar to the mac68k port (where you can just 
download the binaries, then unpack them into their places (usually you 
have to supply --unlink to tar), then restart and everything turns out 
great). Anyway, it appears I was wrong. After installing etc (and 
meticulously going through each file as one should), I went for base and 
then all the programs base replaced got screwed up because they needed 
the newer kernel (I learned this with some experimentation).

So I was forced to force restart the machine by hitting the restart key 
on my computer (shutdown was coring because of the older kernel). Then 
when the machine rebooted it was really messed, as one can imagine. So I 
put in the old NetBSD-1.3.3 installer disk I had and restarted.

I went into sysinst and was hoping it would have some type of ppp support 
so it would download the files and try re-installing them. No luck. It 
added some files to my hd, and moved my etc to etc.old.

I ended up having to mount my two filesystems (/ and /usr) off of the 
floppy, and by setting up a cheap symlink (so that usr stuff was 
installed in /usr) I got everything installed (including the new kern 
binary). I also moved all of my etc.old into my original etc dir (which 
was already upgraded by hand). I did not delete the normal etc dir, just 
rewrote everything in it with the stuff in etc.old. 

Upon rebooting, this time from the hard drive, the sysinst screen pops 
up. I tried switching around kernels (between the old kernel and the new 
kernel), but it still kept on popping up. I found the binary, and deleted 
it. Now when I start up I'm stuck in singleuser. Typing 'exit' merely 
runs a forced fsck on my filesystems then goes right back to singleuser. 
Yes, my /etc/rc.conf file is configured to allow me to get past 
singleuser :)

So I'm guessing there must be an option or a file that is telling the 
computer not to go into multiuser mode, for some strange reason. I tried 
looking for some man page on sysinst, but to no avail. I'm pretty much 
out of options right now. Coming from the mac68k port, this entire 
"sysinst" concept is pretty foreign to me :)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

-- Josh