I was under the impression that sysinst is very
primitive and thought that Open and FreeBSD have
better installers. 

I didn't notice it when NetBSD/i386 1.6 installed 
fine on the other end of the my second, ATA 
(40G) disk unceremoniously and the system
booted fine, though I remember that sysinst was
very concerned about the bootability of my
setup and asked a lot of questions about it.

FreeBSD 4.7 /stand/sysinstall refuses to even
put a disklabel on the disk.

OpenBSD installs fine, (It acts like it knows
everything about the boot situation), but 
refuses to boot. 

Ram Chandar.