> > Hi, I have a VIA VA503+ motherboard with AMD K6-2-400 and 128 MB SDRAM, with
> > the very latest BIOS flashed into the motherboard.
> 
> What is the date on the BIOS?  If it is from early this year, or older, it
> probably can't handle such a large drive. 

It's dated 3 October 2000.

> > The disk is 45.0G WD Caviar 450AA, a standard IDE disk.  No matter what I 
> > seem to do to the VIA Award BIOS settings, I can't get it to recognize the
> > disk (it is configured as Primary Master).

> So you tried something like "User mode, 16383, 16, 63" already?

Yes, and every other "reasonable" combination I could think of.

>> However, when I power-cycle the machine, since (for whatever reason) the BIOS
>> does not recognize this drive, it never boots NetBSD!
>> 
>> Has anybody seen this before, and have some suggestions?

> Well, worst case you could make a bootable floppy with your kernel on it.

There seems to be a little "catch 22" there - I have to have a system running
in order to make a bootable floppy.  And sysinst wants to reboot the system
after it finished installing.  But I can't reboot the system from the 45G HD.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'm still trying to figure out some way to get
this to work.  I did try a different disk, 13176/16/63, and the bios 
automatically figured that out.  So the machine is basically working.

-Mike