Resolution: it turns out to be related to the bootmanager I used to boot off the primary slave ATA drive; or at least, if I tell it to virtually swap the drives, the system boots (I still suspect something in the interaction though; this is the first time in 5 years that Smart Bootmanager has let me down -- http://btmgr.sf.net/). Now the problem is that although the boot works, something prevents me from fdisking/relabeling ad0 -- I suspect something in GEOM gets confused by the boot from 'ad0' which turns out to be 'ad1' when the FreeBSD ata driver looks at things... *sigh* I'm going to try fdisk/disklabel from a fixit floppy, and if that doesn't work I'll just reinstall by hand from CD, onto an ad0/ad2 gvinum mirror (which was the point of this frustrating exercise). Thanks for thinking along with me :) --Stijn -- "I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure."
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