First, let me apologize for sounding as I'm complaining endlessly. I'm
pretty sure I could get everything working eventually, but I suspect
someone else will experience problems similar to mine. And, hopefully
others trying to keep a Quadra 660av meaningfully working will
benefit, just as I've benifitted from reading archived posts from
people who previoulsy had install problems. 

Some of my problems are in fact things I've seen mentioned before
going through the list archives, etc. but not clearly enough for me to
figure out. Some are trivial or simply odd - like my personal
inability to get the right directory info for your CD typed in
correctly when I'm trying tto install.  My disk format problem is
definitely with a 1GB>Quantum Fireball being compounded by the
formatting software on both the Mac and the NetBSD side.  

I believe part of my problem has to do with having a partition within
NetBSD begin after 1GB has been used; i.e. having over 1GB passed
where the MacOS is partitioned allocated to NetBSD, and then having a
partition start more than 1GB from the start of the NetBSD
installation. I am resigning myself to simply a root, swap, and user
partition. None of them starting after 1GB. Currently I'm just using
root,swap, and usr and that seems to be fine - so far.

...

>  3) Boot the Installation Kernel for NetBSD.  It's on the CD.

I tried simply pointing the booter to the kernel on the CD once and
that failed. I've been copying it to the hard drive. Should I be able
to simply point everything to the CD and run it.

>  4) Do the install using the CD - you'll have to change the default 
> directory path but

> 
> As a precaution you might want to install the kern_sbc kernel rather than 
> the kern one.

Given my experience and the other things I read, combined with using a
Quantum Fireball I always use sbc if I can.  Though I assume that the
netbsd-INSTALLSBC.gz sysinst kernel will install the SBC kernel. I
hope that's correct.

> 
> If you install using Sysinst you won't be able to use the MacOS Installer 
> application, but you shouldn't need it anyway.  It doesn't recognize the 
> filesystem used by Sysinst.  The Booter application still works, but 
> usually only on small root filesystems.  For that reason it's almost 
> required that you allocate separate root, swap and usr filesystems as a 
> minimum. Keep the root filesystem small, probalby no larger than 16Meg. 
> 

This is odd because I've been creating root partitions between 5 and
30 times that size with no noticeble problems.  Other than trying to
create a partition that begins behind the 1GB mark withing NetBSD, I
haven't had problems. I do always have to remember to significantly up
the memory for the Booter application; I set its application memory to 30M.

What I have now is a small system, the booter application, and the
install kernel on about a 20M MacOS partition. (I keep the other tools
on abootable  syquest drive - BTW, I haven't been able to get a clue on how to
mount the sysquest when NetBSD is running). 

I'm not completely sure about some of what your saying - i.e. I don't
know if I needed to copy the netbsd-INSTALLSBC.gz kernel to my MacOS
HD partition or if I can actually load it off the CD.

-- 
Josh Kuperman                       
josh@saratoga.lib.ny.us