Well, yahoo...I just made some boot floppies using /usr/src/distrib...
and booted my friend Bill's machine off them!  It was exciting as hell...
well, maybe you had to be there.

In the process I attempted to write my root partition to my MSDOS
partition with a command resembling this:
% find / | cpio -o | gzip -9 > /msdos/d/netbsd/slash.gz

This cruised along happily for a while, then muttered something
about "lost inode: 0".  This made me somewhat nervous, though the
MSDOS file system code has worked well for me up to now.  I rebooted
and selected MSDOS, which informed me that my 250 MB D: drive had
"170MB in lost clusters in 4000 (or so) chains", which is Microsoft
for "you're hosed now buddy".  Luckily for me there was only one file
I really cared about, and a friend who knows about these things helped
me locate it.

A few short hours with a tapedrive (a CMS, unfortunately for my Unix
system) and DOS was up and happy, albeit four months out of date.

So as a matter of strategy, I intend to make a separate DOS partition
for Unix-DOS transfers, and suggest that other users with similar
interests do the same, at least till we figure out what went wrong.