>   I then tried to bood from sd1a by saying:
> 
>      boot disk1:a netbsd -s
> 
> The rom monitor then proceeds to tell me that the file read off the disk is
> not an executable file.  I tried a stripped version of netbsd also.  I then

You probably do not have bootblocks on this partition. Install those, or
-- since you appear to have another bootable disk attached -- try:

	boot -a

and answer `disk1' when asked for the device name, and `netbsd' when asked
for a kernel (I don't remember exactly what the SunOS bootblock prompts
look like).

-pk