On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Konrad Schroder wrote:

> > [ disklabel hell, problem with kernel maybe? ]
> 
> From a quick perusal of disksubr.c it looks like the kernel won't pay
> attention to the disklabel if there is an MBR on the disk, which disklabel
> doesn't write over for you.  (The boot blocks also have this same
> problem.)  You might try "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rwd0d bs=8192 count=1"
> to wipe out the MBR, and then repeat Luke's suggestion.

I thought of this and tried it too, but alas that didn't help either.

It occurred to me that maybe my drive is having serious bit-rot problems,
and after doing some tests with 'dd', I came to the conclusion that it
was.  So I took a good look at it and found a surface mount inductor on
the drive circuit board has blown!  It probably is part of a noise filter,
and hence without it the drive is prone to random bit flipping.

Thanks for all the help,
-J