Broken loader on 7.1-STABLE?

[Reuben]

Good morning everyone,

I was wondering if anyone else was seeing loader (v1.02) break after updating from 7.1-RELEASE to 7.1-STABLE.  After performing the prescribed updating procedure (via the handbook), the system will go through the normal steps and after the boot menu will present the following error:

Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0 

According to the bugbusting page on the FreeBSD wiki there's two issues at work that cause this behavior; patches were committed to HEAD/RELENG earlier last year in Mar and Aug.  Up until now I've never come across this problem in 6.x or 7.0.  In doing a little research I've come across a few older threads via google where it was believed that the problem was caused by improper CFLAGS in make.conf.  I've commented mine out and rebuilt things.. with the same end result.  In fact, if it's any help, my CFLAGS declaration in make.conf is taken verbatim from the /usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf.  Furthermore, on selecting option 6 from the boot menu (escape to loader prompt), the system [I'm assuming] crashes displaying a blinking ASCII pattern from which only a hard reboot will work.

FWIW, this is a fairly plain system.. nothing special in sysctl.conf or loader.conf, and the kernel is pretty stock as well (more or less GENERIC with my sound device and pf).

A temporary fix for me was to copy over loader.old to loader in /boot.

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  All I ask is to please CC me in the reply to the list as I don't currently subscribe to -stable.

TIA
Reuben A. Popp

-- 

I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else. That is the alpha and omega of my argument.

-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon