I am trying to install NetBSD (2006.07.07.00.00.00 for now) on a Dell
XPS M1210 laptop.  The kernel detects the ethernet device as:

    bce0 at pci5 dev 0 function 0: Broadcom BCM4401-B0 10/100 Ethernet

Configuration of the device with ifconfig seems fine.  However, as
soon as the device is connected to a live network, the console scrolls
the following messages (for each packet?):

    bce0: data error

This seems to originate from the interrupt handler in
dev/pci/if_bce.c.

Any suggestions on what is going wrong and how to fix it are welcome.

By the way, for testing I would like to boot this machine from a USB
stick.  Given that I can compile a system, how should I format the USB
stick to be bootable?

Cheers,
Brook