boot0(?) bootloader FUBAR on an old 8.0-STABLE

[exscape]

I haven't touched my FreeBSD box in months now, since it was the testing grounds for upgrading my production server - that didn't happen (yet, anyhow).

Anyway, I fired it up today, to upgrade from some 8.0-STABLE revision released soon after(?) 8.0-RELEASE to the latest -STABLE.

This is what I see on the screen (if I press F1 and then pause/break really quickly, otherwise it fills the screen several times a second)...

Verifying DMI Pool Data ........... [last line before FreeBSD gets control]

F1 FreeBSD
F5 Drive 1 [my swap disk]

Boot: F1
/boot.config: -D -S115200

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
boot: *.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*. etc

... where the *'s are the ASCII character 187 (decimal, of course), and the .'s ASCII character 191.
http://www.asciitable.com/

Those characters print in an infinite loop, with the screen scrolling along as fast as it can print the characters. When I press pause/break, the last 10 or so characters are all #187, with the blinking cursor after the last one.

Any clue what the heck is wrong? I can't remember if it worked last time I checked, as that was probably in 2009.
If I do boot from a CD, what do I do to recover/reinstall the boot loader? Simply use sysinstall and 10 seconds later it's done?

It's a ZFS root system (but /boot.config appears to read all right, so... hmm) with an UFS /boot.
Athlon 64 3200+, FreeBSD/amd64
nForce4 motherboard.

 

[exscape]

New trouble... I installed a new boot0, and zfsboot (both from the 8.1-BETA1 LiveFS CD) and moved the kernel stuff to /boot on the ZFS root partition (tank/root), and now I'm getting "No ZFS pools located, can't boot". I've tried quite a bit of stuff, but it won't find anything.

 

[arp242]

F1 FreeBSD
F5 Drive 1 [my swap disk]
Boot: F1
/boot.config: -D -S115200

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
boot: *.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*. etc

This is the boot0 (i.e. MBR) working and running. Not completly sure what exactly you mean with "*.*.* etc" and "ASCII character 187" (Which is a box drawing character...?) but at this point the kernel should be loaded & the system should start booting.
In any case, it's way past the boot0 stage, so this doesn't seem to be the problem. At this point the boot loader (i.e. /boot/loader) is being run.

I'm not sure about the ZFS error, I haven't really had the chance/reason to use ZFS.

In any case, I would recommend to check your hard disk first, I wrote some instructions on how to do that here:
http://www.daemonforums.org/showpost.php?p=28164&postcount=4

Posting your partition table layout and disklabel layout may also help us to understand your problem.

F5 Drive 1 [my swap disk]

Why do you use a separate partition table entry? You can just create a new label with bsdlabel. (Using a partition table entry if the Linux way of doing it ).
Now that you've got it set up, keep it this way (If it works, it works), but just for future reference

 

[exscape]

This is the boot0 (i.e. MBR) working and running. Not completly sure what exactly you mean with "*.*.* etc" and "ASCII character 187" (Which is a box drawing character...?) but at this point the kernel should be loaded & the system should start booting.
In any case, it's way past the boot0 stage, so this doesn't seem to be the problem. At this point the boot loader (i.e. /boot/loader) is being run.

Yeah, it printed those box drawing characters. I wasn't sure they would show up properly on the forums, so I used * and . to represent the pattern it was printing instead.

Since switching from boot2 to zfsboot "helped", I'm assuming the problem was in boot2, and not the loader, though?