panic, then trashed IDE drive - from kernel dump?

[Bryan Liesner]

The last known good state of my system was a world and kernel from
Sunday, Aug 24 at approx 12:00 EDT.

This problem is from a kernel built from sources current as of
Aug 26th at approx 22:00 EDT

Here's the sequence - I booted the system, had a panic while running
sysctl from etc/rc.d/devd.  It completed a core dump, and rebooted.
(Good, I thought, this time I'll have a dump for a backtrace).

The system rebooted and found no bootable disks. I had to repartition
the disk and restore from backup.  I suspect the dump scribbled all
over the drive...

This is repeatable, and I found out, I have good backups :)

Anything I can do to help, please let me know.  I'll try to get some
sort of a backtrace, but I think doing it from a core dump will be
futile...

Thanks.