> > why partition on which i do installboot MUST begin in first sector of
> > netbsd fdisk partition? (or 0 if no fdisk partitions made)
> > 
> > installboot manpage says only first stage loader is in disklabel area
> > which THEN loads the rest
> 
> In a sense, where else would you want to put it and why? The bootblocks will
> have to find it somewhere, so beginning of partition sounds like a good
> place to look..

maybe i've sid it unclear:

look at this (my home machine):

a is root / partition , b is swap, no more real partitions for netbsd.

because i want swap to be near beginning of disk (faster) and disk is 20GB
i made partition e ONLY to hold "boot" file. boot itself can load kernel
from anywhere (looks like BIOS supports extended int13 commands).

this works:

8 partitions:
#        size   offset     fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a: 38909556  1101744     4.2BSD      512  4096    24   # (Cyl. 1093 - 39693*)
  b:   295144   806600       swap                        # (Cyl.  800*- 1092)
  c: 39204900   806400     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.  800 - 39693*)
  d: 40011300        0     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 39693*)
  e:      200   806400     4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.  800 - 800*)
  f:   806337       63      MSDOS                        # (Cyl.    0*- 799)


but i've tried to put bootstrap to e partition raw (with -b option in
installboot). i've made partition e beginning from 806404 (to not overlab
with disklabel) with "boot" type and then installboot -v -b 0 /dev/rwd0e.
installboot works right without any error (and messages looks ok) but i 
have "no operating system" when booting.