Hi,

I'm frustrated and could really use some help.  I have a Toshiba
Satellite PSM40C-SF300E laptop that I can't get to boot NetBSD 3.0.
This laptop comes with Windows XP preinstalled and a recovery DVD-ROM.
It is my goal to have the ability to boot either WinXP of NetBSD on
this laptop, but the steps I have taken toward this goal have not
yielded any gains.

One of the first steps I took when I got the laptop was to install
NetBSD 2.1 from CD.  The installation works fine and appears to be
happy at all stages; however after rebooting the laptop it will not
boot.  I do not see the familiar NetBSD bootloader countdown to the
loading of the kernel.  In fact, I see no NetBSD-related output of any
kind while attempting to boot from the hard disk.  It is as though
there is no operating system on the hard disk.

When NetBSD 3.0 was released I was hopeful that it would fix the
booting problem I was having with 2.1 and so I quickly wrote the ISO
image to CD-RW and performed an install.  As in 2.1 the 3.0 install
was perfect, with the exception that I was unable to boot the computer
from the hard disk.  Now with both 2.1 and 3.0 I have instructed
sysinst to use the entire disk and install the latest bootblocks.  I
chose BIOS console in both NetBSD versions.

After reading the NetBSD/i386 FAQ, I began to believe that NetBSD
could have misunderstood the hard disk geometry and so I began to
attempt to collect information on this with hope of finding the actual
geometry.  The hard disk is a Fujitsu MHU2100AT.  This table includes
my findings:

  Cylinders  Heads  Sectors  Source
      16383     16       63  Fujitsu website
       1023     16       63  sysinst on NetBSD 3.0
        963      2        4  pfdisk.exe 0 (then pressed 'L')
        306      4       17  pfdisk.exe 1 (then pressed 'L')

Both times I ran pfdisk.exe inside of Windows XP I got a warning about
a program attempting to access the raw disk directly.  I instructed
Windows XP to ignore this warning.  I don't feel confident that I know
the correct geometry of the disk.

I also attempted to configure the NetBSD bootloader to allow me to
select multiple operating systems, also without success.  I created a
partition for NTFS and labeled that partition as WinXP and the default
bootable system as NetBSD.  At no time have I ever seen anything I've
done result in the boot sequence printing anything to the screen about
NetBSD.  What am I doing wrong?

Ryan