Have you checked
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/misc/index.html#why-single-user

		David/absolute

Q:  Why do ducks have flat feet?	Q:  Why do elephants have flat feet?
A:  To stamp out forest fires.		A:  To stamp out flaming ducks.

On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Ognen Duzlevski wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I was running netbsd 1.4 on an HP 9000/360 booting off another machine
> and later on I installed the system on the HP's hard-drive, it did boot-up
> and was working for a day or so. However when I powered down and then
> powered up again the disk-partitioning information set with disklabel is
> lost and the system boots up in single user mode mounting the filesystem
> read-only and I cant do anything with it. I also seem to be getting a
> warning message about a bad battery. The HP is not accessible to me right
> now so I cannot reproduce the exact message. Does the partition
> information have anything to do with the battery? How do I remount the
> system to be r/w so that I can fiddle with fstab (rd0 and rd1 report
> errors but rd2 seems to have the partitioning scheme just fine). Or am I
> just lost? :)
> 
> Thanx for any help,
> Ognen
>