> For some reason, mounting /dev/wd2e didn't work - maybe because I had 
> booted from a 1.5 CD,

The ffsv2 merge seems to have broken compatibility with old versions
of everything :-(

> maybe because it saw the disklabel as corrupt rather than missing?

That shouldn't make any difference, OTOH since the magic numbers
were present and the checksum wrong [1] it is actually possible that
the numbers were present in the disklabel sector.

	David

[1] I rewrote a lot of the label checking/generating code last week
in order to netbsd to boot off a system where the netbsd partiton
is in the extended partition list [2] and to put up to 8 extended
partitions into the internally generated label.

[2] Useful for people who want to play with another OS...

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk