Thanks a *lot* for the help.  Now my NetBSD system is fully bootable. 
The disktab discussion cleared things up too, and I now know that I did
it correctly.

> For the bad sector problem: VS2000 firmware does some kind of bad
> sector replacement (I don't know if it's bad144-compatible). The
> struct holding the on-disk information is declared in hdc9224.c,
> but since my RD32 doesn't have any bad spots I could never check
> how these blocks are handled and what happens if the controller
> happens to access such a bad spot. There are methods to find the
> address of the replacement-sector, but I've no clue how to do it...

I'll have to look into that eventually.  Now I just want to try and get
a complete system, and everything seems to work.  The reason I'm a bit
paranoid about the RD53 is because I added circuitry to it to force it
to spin up and opened it to put in a paper that prevents the head
assembly from sticking to a rubber bumper.

> BTW: This is the reason why you can't install the bootblocks you've
>      dd'ed from RX33 via disklabel. Either use dd to install the
>      bootblocks and restore the correct label after that operation
>      or clear out the label-portion by hand and use disklabel.

Actually you *can* do that, beause none of the install floppies had disk
labels.  However, I couldn't do it on the VS2000 because NetBSD didn't
seem to recognize the floppy drive... weird, but I don't care because I
can't keep a floppy drive and a full height hard drive in anyways.

I used dd, gzip od and sed on my Linux box.  I extracted the bootblock
from the boot disk image.  Then I compressed it and converted it to an
awk program to write out the data using printf octal excapes in awk. 
That got transferred using cat over the console port to the VS2000. 
Then awk, gunzip and disklabel and I'm done.  Twisted isn't it?  :-)

Now I'll do the same to install some serial file transfer protocol so I
can upload the rest of NetBSD.  (Yeah, I should just go buy an ethernet
card)

-- 
|  Boris Gjenero <bgjenero@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>              |
|  Home page:  http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bgjenero/     |
|  "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to   |
|  depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, ROTJ  |