Thanks to all that responded, yes it did turn out to be a protection
issue with the front of the disk.  I redid the disklabel to start
deeper in to the disk and everything worked the way you would expect
from there. I newfs'd the ld and copied 20gigs on to it with out 
any problems.

Brings up one question though :)  Why did it work on 1.6-release with
the other disklabel?

-Sean