This one is close to what is actually going on, but since it hasn't popped 
out yet (and I'm nearly done with reading whats new on this list) allow me 
to offer the "official" answer:

The VS3100 monitor uses SCSI-1 commands to talk to the disk. The original 
protocol was limited to drives that were at most 1GByte (couldn't address 
larger drives).

So to boot such a disk, the monitor boot has to be able to fetch the blocks 
for boot and they have to be within the first GB of disk space. Then there 
is VMS, when VMS does a machine check dump it uses the monitors disk 
functions to write out the crash image, if the page file isn't in the first 
GB of the disk it can't do that.

Since NetBSD doesn't do core dumps using the Monitor's disk i/o functions 
you are fine if the boot is in the first GB of the disk.

--Chuck

At 09:57 AM 2/15/02 +1100, pgaray@towertechnology.com.au wrote:

>the one gig limit is for the root/boot for BSD. VMS does not have
>partitions, so for VMS the boot partition size == disk size. You can use
>the 4 G as long as you partition it properly.
>
>other: when your box boots, it says what CPU board it is, KAxxx, if you are
>not sure.