Hello David!

Going back to the disk thing for a moment...

  DB> Historically, Partition 'a' was the root partition,
    > 'b' was the swap partition, 'c' was the NetBSD portion
    > of the disk, and 'd' was the entire hard drive.
    >
    > You should change 'c:' to 'a:', then add an unused
    > 'c:' of the same size.  Drives 'c' and 'd' are used at
    > specific times and aren't set to a type, typically.

I don't know for sure, but I think there may be some
assumptions built into disklabel.  It seemed to come up with
different defaults depending on whether the primary or
secondary disk was the data disk.  Back when I had NetBSD on
the secondary disk, It came up with seperate 'c' and 'd'
partitions (and possibly another, I don't quite recall).
When I was eventually sensible enough to get NetBSD on the
primary disk, disklabel just produced one large 'a' partition
on the secondary, data disk.  Perhaps it makes a difference
that I didn't need fdisk (for the data disk) in the second
case though.

Regards,
  - Andy Ball.