I have an ancient packard bell, with an old bios, and an old IDE
controller, and a nice new 850 MB IDE drive.

I got netbsd to boot off a little 125 mb drive set up as the first drive..
and I have this one set up as the second drive..  (its not entered in the
bios..  I was relying on NETBSD to pick it up)

netbsd picks it up fine.. identifies it just peachy.  but when I type
disklabel -r wd1 
i get 
hard error fsbn 0 etc etc..  (about a page of that and other kernel HD is
toast messages)
i know this drive is OK..  it just seems to me like I'm missing something
here..  does netbsd need a newer controller in order to use this drive?