Another thing:

>> a: size-of-drive-64 64 4.2BSD....
>> [...] installboot done on /dev/sd0a, [...]

With the NetBSD portion of the disk starting at an offset that's lower
than 64, say the most common 0 or 63, doing this seems to go against
the installboot(8) manual page, which states:

   _rawdiskdevice_  The name of the raw device corresponding to the
                    partition on which the boot program is to be
                    installed. The partition should start at the
                    beginning of the NetBSD portion of the disk and
                    must contain a FFS filesystem.

Or does this just mean "near enough to keep 'a' within the first 1024
cylinders of the disk"?

-tih
-- 
Puritanism -- the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.