On Sun, Jul 18, 1999 at 01:41:23PM -0400, Keith Browne wrote:
> NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
> cylinders: 9006 heads: 8 sectors/track: 246 (1968 sectors/cylinder)
                                          ^^^
> 
> BIOS disk geometry:
> cylinders: 1023 heads: 255 sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
                                            ^^
> Partition table:
> 0: <UNUSED>
> 1: <UNUSED>
> 2: <UNUSED>
> 3: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
>     start 246, size 17723562 (8654 MB), flag 0x80
            ^^^
> 	beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
                                   ^          ^
> 	end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63

I'm not a BIOS/DOS/i386 guru but maybe here's the problem:
For the BIOS a track has 63 sectors, so it will search at sector 63
for the partition, but your partition starts with sector 246.

BTW: My root partitions all start with offset 0 (head 0, sector 1)
and I don't have any problems with it.  (Once I filled the root partition 
completly up to see if this could damage the mbr/partition table.)

> # disklabel sd0
> # /dev/rsd0d:
[...]
> 8 partitions:
> #        size   offset     fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
>   a:   308730      246     4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.    0*- 156)
                     ^^^


[...]
> That "WARNING: old BSD partition ID!" message makes me wonder.
NetBSD has now it's own partition ID (169), this message will
go away if you can boot from your new disk.

-- 
Dies ist Thilos Unix Signature! Viel Spass damit.