Try Peter's suggestion.  (^&

I think that what you outline (booting to hard disk, resetting, booting
from CD, mounting / and reading /var/log/messages) would work to get
dmesg.

Did you try booting single-user, as I suggested?  If you can talk to the
boot loader, you might be able to talk to NetBSD in single-user mode.
It's not a *solution*, but it would give a bit of information about the
nature of the problem.

Cross-compiling: I don't think that you can do that with the present
release, but -current is headed that way (if it's not already there).


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu