Actually, I've figured it out now. What happened was that when I was
installing the box, 'fdisk' somehow gave me a default end cylinder for the
last partition on the disklabel which was actually one cylinder past the
end of the disk. Hence the mysterious crash every time I did a make install
of XFree86 (since this causes lots of disk accesses).
I booted into NetBSD from floppy and their disklabel immediately pointed
out that 'partition f extends beyond end of unit'. So I rewrote the
disklabel, restored from backup and all seems fine now. The moral of this
story is, fdisk sucks and it needs to be rewritten to properly support
PC partitions/BSD disklabels/whatever.
mato
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