> 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''.

Actually, this is an artifact of the boot program - there's nothing
preventing one from writing a boot program which understands
partitions other than the desire to try to fit the entire thing into
8k.

			       _MelloN_