> Have you tried booting a custom kernel with some drivers removed? No. I wouldn't know which drivers to remove. The problem is the Kernel utters absolutely nothing, so it must hang very, very early.
> have you tried an uncompressed one? No, but I guess the official install image (on a USB key) is supposed to work as-is, no? > The simplest way to debug something is using a serial port, do you have > access to the one on this machine? Yes, there is one. It seems to sort-of mirror the on-screen messages up to the point the NetBSD boot runs. I tried consdev com0,9600 from the boot prompt but that hung the machine.