[Bug 238349] Fresh install will not boot under some circumstances

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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=238349

            Bug ID: 238349
           Summary: Fresh install will not boot under some circumstances
           Product: Base System
           Version: 12.0-RELEASE
          Hardware: amd64
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Some People
          Priority: ---
         Component: misc
          Assignee: bugs at FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: rfg-freebsd at tristatelogic.com

It appears to be the case that if a fresh install, e.g. of 12.0-RELEASE onto a
hard drive which has previously had all of its partitions removed (but not its
partition table), e.g. under Ubuntu/Linux, via the gparted tool, may result in
a system that will not boot.

This specifically happened to me when I attemtped to do a fresh install of
12.0-RELEASE onto such a hard drive.  Note that in this specific case I had
elected to perform "manual" partitioning during the FreeBSD install process.

I ended up resolving this problem by putting the drive, temporarily, into an
existing FreeBSD system and then doing the following steps:

1)  gpart destroy -F ada0
2)  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=1M count=10
3)  Re-doing the entire FreeBSD install from scratch

The fact that these steps resulted in a bootable FreeBSD system suggests to me
that there are some things that aren't being done properly, i.e. to clear out
old partition-related cruft, when and if one is doing a fresh install of
FreeBSD, but possibly only when the person doing the install has elected to
perform manual partitioning during the install process, and possibly only when
all old partitions (but not the partition table) have been removed previously
using, e.g., Linux+gparted.

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