> well, the boot message does say that it's trying to use sd1a. I don't 
> know why though. My root device has always been sd2a, and the booter is 
> configured accordingly.
> 
> I did remove a scsi disk from my chaing which was numbered 1, but it 
> wasn't a BSD drive, much less a root drive. Could that possible be 
> effecting this?

Yep, that's your problem.  The way that scsi naming works under netbsd is 
that, at boot time, whatever the lowest numbered (i.e. scsi id number) 
scsi device is, it is called sd0.  Since the internal hard drive on a 
Mac is usually scsi id#0, it is usually sd0.  The the device with the 
next scsi id# is sd1, and so on.  So, by removing that device from your 
chain, you have removed one of the lower numbered devices from your 
chain, so your netbsd root device has slid down to the sd1 slot.

There are two ways to fix this:

1) you can do a

mount -w /dev/sd1a /

and then edit your /etc/fstab file to reflect the reality of things, or

2) in the installer utility, build devices, which should update 
/etc/fstab (or, there may be an option to rebuild /etc/fstab, I can't 
quite remember at the moment).

I hope this helps.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                      ender@is.rice.edu
Consultant                                        Rice University
Information Technology Services                       Houston, TX