According to your explanation above, the UFS (either V1 or 2) filesystem starts at the beginning of the device, but reserves space for the boot blocks. I.e. when copying the device, no blocks must be skipped; fsck(8) will know that it has to skip the 1st blocks because they are reserved for the boot blocks and are not used by the filesystem anyway. FreeBSD 7 has UFS2 already, correct? I guess that the OP did not skip any block on the initial copy (with dd(1)?). That's why I suggest to copy with recoverdisk(1) instead; because it seems there might have been something going wrong when copying. I recommended to check that the image is ok (verify img(dd) == img(recoverdisk)); but the OP did not reply... I recommended to fsck(8) the device & the image before mounting, but the OP did not reply...