"cg 0: bad magic number" [used to be "Disappointed with version 6.0]

[Peter]

Ok, I have narrowed down my problem a great deal.  It appears that
FreeBSD cannot read the partition table of my 300 GB Seagate Barracuda.
 My dos diagnostic utility works because it accesses the disk in a
different way.

I used the entire disk (one slice/partition) and attempted to format
it.  This is what I get after it reaches the end of the disk:

"cg 0: bad magic number"

It also slows down significantly about 3/4 through the procedure.

Now the funny part.  I create two partitions and the newfs output is
exactly the same as before when I try to format the first partition! 
It tries to format as if there is only one partition and produces the
same error.

If I remove the slice via sysinstall and then try fdisk I get this:

# fdisk -vBI ad3
******* Working on device /dev/ad3 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=581421 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=581421 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Information from DOS bootblock is:
1: sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 63, size 586072305 (286168 Meg), flag 80 (active)
        beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
        end: cyl 812/ head 15/ sector 63
2: <UNUSED>
3: <UNUSED>
4: <UNUSED>
fdisk: Geom not found

Anyone?

--
Peter

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