>>Err, how do you know it doesn't work?  BTW, are you talking about the floppy
>>drive or the hard drve?
>
> This is for the floppy drive and I make the dangerous assumption that
>1. no label being output and 2. the above error message, means that
>something is wrong.

I see from down below that it looks like you're running "disklabel fd0" ...
is that right?  If so, I _think_ what's happening is that it's trying to use
/dev/rfd0d.  The minor device numbers on the floppies are used to select
drive densities, so if you just say "fd0" you'll get the wrong device.  What
happens when you try "disklabel /dev/rfd0a"? (I freely admit this is all
confusing :-) )

> Well I gathered that, but I'm still rather shocked that a NetBSD
>program (fdisk) can't read one of it's own disks, or is it just a
>literal port of the MS-DOS program?

Well, it's supposed to be used to manipulate MS-DOS partition tables; if there
ain't a MS-DOS partition table on the disk (which is usually the case if you
install NetBSD on the whole drive) then it won't have much to do :-)

> The BIOS says they are both 1048 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sect/track, NetBSD
>probes the same information on booting.  If fdisk reports something
>different then that's it's problem.  [Someone more MS-DOS knowledgable
>than I said that the figures looked correct for a MS-DOS drive so I
>have been presuming that it's just not been working for a NetBSD
>drive]

1048?  I was under the impression you couldn't set the BIOS to more than 1023
cylinders?  But I see from down below you tried a fake geometry, so obviously
that's not the problem.

--Ken