I have installed several disks that have > 1024 cylinders and have used
both DOS and NetBSD.  What has worked for me EVERY TIME is:
(This may not be the best, but it has always worked for me.
As always, I'm not responsible for what you do with this information :)

  a) Tell the BIOS that you have 1023 cylinders and the correct geometry
	for heads and sectors.  (This will limit your DOS part of the
	disk to be LESS than the first 1023 cylinders.)  You need to have
	ALL of 	your partition A (/dev/wd?a) in the first 1023 cylinders 
	so that	the boot program can read the kernel from the root partition
	using the BIOS routines.

  b) With fdisk, partition your 1023 cylinders as you want them.

  c) Use the real geometry in NetBSD.  Once the NetBSD kernel is booted, it
	does not have the 1024 cylinder limit.  That is only for the BIOS.
	It also looks at the BSD disklabel, not the DOS disk label.  The
	two disk labels (DOS and BSD will not agree on the BSD partition
	size!)

  d) Use NetBSD!

-- 
Phil Nelson
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil