Hello Mark!

  MJW> My /usr has lots of stuff in, too; 900M in pkg, 150M
     > in local, and 200M in X11R6.  That gives about 90M
     > absolute minimum there.

I don't think I'll be attempting X on a 386sx machine <grin>

  MJW> If you can't use NFS, you can use a *really* small
     > partition to do this in chunks (it needs to be big
     > enough to hold base.tgz and etc.tgz in the first
     > round, after which NetBSD should boot fine -- looks
     > like about 18M would be just enough).  Maybe there's
     > some partition other than /usr you could use for this
     > (maybe /home or /var, or extra swap space)?

Well, perhaps I should just let 'auto defaults for all' do
its thing on the 245Mb Quantum drive, install from the 170Mb
Conner and then use it as a manually mounted work space. The
disadvantage that springs to mind is that the swap space
would come out of the Quantum's 245Mb (I'm not sure that's a
significant disadvantage though).

Regards,
  - Andy.