Many thanks for the very descriptive suggestions.  It really helped to
have a better understanding of how things should look.  Honestly, this
is my first attempt at using disklabel and fdisk without the sysinst
front-end, so I'm not surprised that I didn't get things right the
first time.

After going over things again, I now have a system that can boot straight
from the disk.

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Conrad T. Pino wrote:

>     fdisk:     start 63, size 17767827 (8676 MB, Cyls 0-1106), Active
>
> disklabel: #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
> disklabel:  c:  17767827        63     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0*-  14623*)
>
> Notice: "fdisk start"      (63) == "disklabel offset"     (63)
> Notice: "fdisk size" (17767827) == "disklabel size" (17767827)

I verified that both disks had partion 3 set as active, and that the
sizes matched up, as you point out above.

> Fixing boot code in MBR, read about "fdisk" options "-i -c":
> http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?fdisk++NetBSD-current

I started out here, and after rebuilding the MBR, instead of
"No operating system" the message was "error 3."

> Fixing boot code in label & file system, check out "installboot":
> http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?installboot+8+NetBSD-current

This is where I looked next, and I now believe that I know what I did
incorrectly in the first place.  From the example for i386:-

   installboot -v -o timeout=5 /dev/rwd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1

I am quite certain that when I tried this the first time that I was
attempting to use device /dev/wd0a, and not /dev/rwd0a.  I have since
added the bootblocks to /dev/rwd0a and /dev/rwd1a, and everything is
working as I would expect.

thanks again,

Brad