>Lastly, is it possible to boot off of
>partitions that are not a?

My experience with  3100s  has been that   they can't boot off of  any
partition other  than a.  I presume   this is because the  ROM monitor
doesn't comprehend  partition tables or some such,  but there could be
another reason.   This does indeed make   installing your first netbsd
system ``tricky''.

							--Greg