> > Is there something we were doing wrong?  Or is there a known problem
> > with the disklabeling on a 1.2G system disk?
> > 
> There has been a problem with disk labeling on pre-1.2G systems; 
> unlabeled disks didn't want to get labeled. That was fixed a month ago.

This wasn't the problem we were having - the disk had been succesfully
labeled, and we verified this by rebooting from the pre-1.2G system
and checking that the label was still there.

The problem was that 1.2G was not recognizing the label on the disk
it was booted from.  This made it impossible to create a file system
on the "a" or "c" partitions.  1.2G was reading labels from other
disks just fine, however.  It appears to me that 1.2G was using
the results from some MSCP probing to establish what the system disk
label was, instead of actually reading the disk label.  We got the
same result whether we used "disklabel -r" or just "disklabel".

Tim.