5.2 is dangerous to drive

Dear Level 5ers,

   I got a 5.2.1 CD in the mail, so I thought I should upgrade
from my older 5.0-CURRENT which had been working very well
for months.

   Big mistake.

   I started sysinstall from my perfectly good system running
5.0, and it duly overwrote the binaries with 5.2 stuff, but on reboot,
the device probes hung up at:
Timecounters 10.000 msec increment   (or something very similar)

This line is right before the probe of the hard drives ad0 and ad1,
but no amount of waiting would allow things to boot farther.

   I found that the 5.2.1 CD and a 5.2 CD would hang at the same place.

   I retreated to a 5.1 miniinst CD, and that worked (I had to
ignominiously prepare the latter CDs by plugging an XP box to
my DSL.)

   I still could not install the 5.1 system over the old system,
as I got panic page faults, which caused a reboot after a few
"chunks" were copied from the CD.

   I have had to open up a new drive and install 5.1 onto that.
I cannot access all partitions on the old hosed drive.
I can not access slice a, the presumptive / directory, which
will not mount.  The other slices mount fine, thankfully,
and the aborted upgrade had saved /etc to /var, so I think
I have all the data I need to rebuild my system.

   My hardware is unremarkable ASUS motherboard, AMD processor
and Western Digital hard drives.  If someone wants more
precise specs, I can prepare them.

   I strongly suggest that sysinstall never be run from the old, live
system on a new CD.  Let the CD try to boot up first, as a presumably safe
test to see if it has this problem of not being able to probe the hard
drive(s).

   Has anyone else had this problem?  Has something changed in
the device probe procedure that could explain this?

   Is there a way to clean/repair my broken slice ad1s1a, which
will not mount?  
---------------------
root:/Mar2004var/tmp/etc>mount /dev/ad1s1a /Mar2004slash
mount: /dev/ad1s1a: Operation not permitted
--------------------
   
-- 

   --  Wayne M Barnes, currently_at_klentaq.com