slice weirdness

Hi,

while trying to migrate my FreeBSD -CURRENT partition to another disk, I keep
running into a slice weirdness issue which makes the kernel unable to find
it's root fs. It seems that something about the partition table is fishy such
that GEOM doesn't find both slices:

Script started on Mon Aug  9 01:05:46 2004
> sudo fdisk ad1
******* Working on device /dev/ad1 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=119150 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=119150 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 7 (0x07),(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX-2 (16 bit) or Advanced UNIX)
    start 63, size 59392242 (29000 Meg), flag 0
	beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
	end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 59392305, size 60709635 (29643 Meg), flag 81
	beg: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63;
	end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>
> sudo ls -l /dev/ad1*
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,  24 Aug  9 01:04 /dev/ad1
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,  26 Aug  9 01:04 /dev/ad1s1
> cat /dev/ad1s2a
cat: /dev/ad1s2a: No such file or directory
> cat /dev/ad1s2a
cat: /dev/ad1s2a: No such file or directory
> exit

Script done on Mon Aug  9 01:06:10 2004

So where's my /dev/ad1s2?

The disk layout is ad1s1 is my Windows partition, ad1s2 my targetted new
partition for the FreeBSD installation currently residing at ad0s1.

I first created ad1s2 by hand using fdisk, but got the exact same result.  The
script above shows the values that I obtained when /sbin/sysinstall
partitioned the drive. After partitioning the device nodes reappear, and I was
able to install{kernel,world} with DESTDIR pointing to the newly mounted
ad1s2, but the device nodes disappear after having booted the newly installed
slice. That boot ends with the kernel unable to find the root file system
ad1s2a (which is not strange given the above).

Am I looking at some sort of geometry bug? I've tried setting the BIOS
geometry settings to LBA (from Auto), that didn't make a difference.  Setting
them to CHS produced an unbootable Windows so I reverted that. In any case
I thought that those values were of historical interest only...

Any clues?

--Stijn

PS: I thought that there was a sysctl that showed the GEOM topology in XML;
    however I was unable to find it in sysctl -a. Is it still around?

-- 
The rain it raineth on the just
	And also on the unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
	The unjust steals the just's umbrella.