First, my configuration:
Micronics p54-90 Pentium Motherboard, with integrated IDE on PCI and
ISA
Orchid Fahrenheit 1280+ on ISA
Conner CFS420A on wd0
16 Megs o' Ram

O.K. To follow up on last night's diatribe, I blasted the bootblocks
to zerohood by making a file of ^@'s and dd'ing it into /dev/rwd0a.

Then I shutdown and booted the kernel disk, proceeded to the
installation disk, where it read off the various devices. Just after
the fd0 line, it pauses for a while, then the next write to the screen
starts in the uper left hand corner, wrapping at around 35 characters
to a point a couple lines down. When it gets to about 2/3 of the way
down the screen, it starts to scroll, but not the whole thing just the
aforemention writings.

 When it comes to the point where there is an error because of a lack
of an rc, it then starts scrolling the whole screen again. It proceeds
with the installation, asking me what disk I want to install on and
it's geometry, whereupon it proceeds to label the disk and mount it,
then copies the various binaries on.

Then I halt and reboot with the original kernel disk (kcaha-1.0),
proceed through bootup, ignoring the "insert file system floppy"
message, and use copy_kernel to install a kernel. Then I reboot again,
sans floppies.

I get the various banners, and the memory check, and then I get the
message:

Read Error

If I boot by using the floppy and doing "wd(0,a)/netbsd" it proceeds
through the boot up, but since it finds the rc it doesn't correct
itself, and proceeds to fsck wd0a and wd0e, and mount them, etc.

I am at a loss. Clearly the disks mount and are labeled correctly (as
far as the label goes). The Primary Bootblocks seem to load. But the
secondary seems to fail. Could this be a problem with the BIOS? (It's
a Phoenix; I can get a version number if anyone thinks that will
help.)

>From reading the sources for the bootblocks for 0.9 it appears that
"Read Error" is displayed if a call to int 19h causes a wrong number
to be loaded into reg. DL. 

Does anyone have any ideas? I am dazed and confused at this point.
--
Hacksaw