Hello David,

  DL> Error '3' means it failed to find 0xaa55 in the last
    > word of the sector it read from the disk.

Ah, so it's meaningful.  Am I right in thinking that this
was output from the bootselector?

  DL> You might have a BIOS that doesn't like LBA disk
    > reads?

I'm not even sure that it's using LBA.  The logical geometry
is something like 2100 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per
track.

  DL> If you can boot netbsd at all, you can dump out the
    > ...mbr eg:

I could boot the installed NetBSD by booting into the
bootselector on the install diskette, and telling it to boot
wd0a:netbsd. Bootselector seems like quite a useful thing to
have around, I'm wondering whether to install it even on
machines that are dedicated to NetBSD.

- Andy Ball.