> It's strange how you can get as far as actually having stuff copied
> to the disk without having done the (nicely interactive) partition
> setup before. c and should be clearly marked "NetBSD part of the
> disk, don't use", and d as "whole disk, don't use", or something
> like that.

No. I ran through the entire process several times. At no point in the
allocation process was I presented with an option to format the NetBSD
partition, or any other partition for that matter. Mind you, I'm looking to
merely erase the contents of the partition now, not anything more
complicated. 

> The NetBSD partition that is listed in the MBR is that part of the
> disk reserved for NetBSD. NetBSD slices  that chunk of the disk
> further for its normal partitions (a: root, b: swap, e, f, g, h,
> ...: everything else). The installation system will do all that for,
> in an easy-to-use, interactive way.
> 
> If it installs to a perperly formatted FFS partition, there is no
> way it could be confused by any "old data" that is still there. Of
> course, most of the data is physically still in the disk blocks,
> but NetBSD just doesn't care at all. It doesn't read blocks that
> are marked as free, it just writes to them if needed. (as does any
> other sane filesystem.)

They aren't marked free. I cannot figure out how to format the disk. I've
tried re-creating the partition, but the data is just still accessible.
Apparently during the installation (near the end when its defining various
permissions) it gets stuck on something it doesn't like. I just want to blow
that all away and try from scratch, that's all. The only thing I want to
retain is the FAT partition at the top of the drive.

Just to point out again, this is a SanDisk 2GB Compact Flash card I
originally partitioned in Linux. I no longer have that Linux box and Vmware
isn't cooperating.

> I hope that clears it up a bit.

Not quite to the point, but I guess I didn't make myself clear in my first
message. Thanks for the try, though.