I hope this topic wasn't discussed recently, I looked in the archive and
didn't see any discussion about this so...

I have a brand-new Pentium motherboard, 48MB memory, 1GB HD IDE, standard
VGA and other stuff.  Everything appears on the supported hardware list.

Using the disk fs images from the floppies directory, I try to boot my
machine to no avail.  Everything seems OK until I need to hit RETURN to
invoke the shell.  When I do, the shell seems to load up, but then an
error occurs and I get the following message: 

   Jul 16 18:03:27 init: single user shell terminated, restarting

and I get the RETURN for shell prompt again.  If I hit RETURN again, I get
a kernel panic complete with a dump to dev 201.

Most of the time, memory in the machine is fragged at this point such that
I must do a hard reset so that the BIOS will do a cold-start.  Otherwise,
I may be lucky and be able to boot off of whatever disk I put in as
normal.  I never do manage to boot into the installation filesystem for
NetBSD.

Is this due to an incompatible PCI/ISA/VESA motherboard, or something
else?


BTW, Slackware Linux 1.2.18 comes up nicely on the same hardware.  Also, I
was forced to boot on the Linux boot disks to gain access to its fdisk
program so I could set up the disk partitions.  Is there other software I
can use to fdisk my hard disk properly for NetBSD other than the
"competition"?

If the sentiment concurs, I will submit my boot problem as a bug, but I
will wait until the verdict comes down from all of you wonderfully helpful
people.  I've been a longtime user of NetBSD on the Amiga platform, and
now I have the opportunity to put NetBSD on a machine at my work to serve
as an Internet Gateway.  NetBSD seems more secure than Linux for this
purpose (if I can get it to work).

Thanks ahead of time for your responses!

------------------
Bruce Drake
Synectics, Inc.
(919) 872-1275 USA