USB thumb drive does not newfs under FreeBSD 7.0 (but does under 6.2)

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20080821144826.GD13934 at perlw2.nber.org>
            Alex Aminoff <aminoff at nber.org> writes:
: 
: 
: We seem to have a USB thumb drive that works under FreeBSD 6.2 but
: does not newfs under 7.0. We hope that there is some package or
: library we have failed to upgrade. Any advice on how to proceed to
: resolve this would be greatly appreciated. If this is the wrong place
: to ask, please point us to the correct place.
: 
: The versions of FreeBSD in question are
: 
: 6.2-RELEASE-p9
: vs
: 7.0-RELEASE-p2
: 
: both are generic kernels. It is the same hardware booted to one or the
: other OS.
: 
: dmesg says:
: 
: da1 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
: da1: <USB 2.0 USB Flash Drive 1100> Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
: da1: 1.000MB/s transfers
: da1: 15424MB (31588352 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 1966C)
: 
:  # fdisk -I /dev/da1
: 
: succeeds on both OSs
: 
:  # newfs /dev/da1s1
: 
: On 6.2, this succeeds, and we can mount
: and use the filesystem. On 7.0, newfs dies with
: 
:  cg 0: bad magic number
: 
: Some searching on that error string turns up stuff about needing to
: reserve space at the beginning of a disk for the partition table. We
: have tried adjusting the parameters of the slice with fdisk with no
: success. In any case it seems strange that this would happen under 7
: but not 6.2.

Does something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1s1 bs=1m" work?

Warner