> The syntax is
> 
>   boot device[:partition][,filename] [arguments]
> 
>
> The device can either be one of the devices listed by "devaliases"
> (hd, cd, enet, etc), or a full openfirmware path. ("dev / ls" will
> list the device tree.)
>

I think I had all that ok then.
so this should have worked


boot hd:0,/netbsd -s

or
boot ide0:0,/netbsd -s


>
>
> The partition in the boot command is only meaningful if you have a Mac
> partition table on the disk. "0" is always the "raw partition", which
> means the whole disk. You can see what the other partitions are by
> looking at your disk with a MacOS disk partitioning tool. On the
> pre-installed MacOS disk in my machine, partition 5 is the one with
> the data on it (and the others have various bookkeeping stuff).
>

How are you keeping the MacOS partition table? Any time I ask NetBSD to
disklabel it writes over the physical drive and include overwriting MacOS
partitions with an nice disklabel.  Do you skip a few K in the offset of the
start of boot partition a ? And how would you actually ask netbsd to use a
MacOS partition 5 to label and install ?


    Do I read that correctly you need to have a MacOS part ?


    Mark :)