Just for the record, we found this independently and I have fixed it for both FreeBSD and NetBSD (FreeBSD r213044). It would be great if we see some more vocal voice saying “Hey you broke X”, which really helps us to fix bugs earlier.

I’ve found the same problem under NetBSD here:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-userlevel/2004/07/08/0008.html

I’ve send an email to the author of this new gzip tools about this problem.

Here is what I did:

I believe that the problem came from ‘dd’ tools, then I try to use the 0.683b CDROM (that use an old ‘dd’ tools)
for installing my image (previously copied from the 0.684b on the ad1s1 drive).

And from a SSH access to this ‘boot from 0.683b CDROM’
# mkdir /mnt/toto
# mount /dev/ad1s1 /mnt/toto/
# cd /mnt/toto/
# /usr/bin/gunzip -S “” -c FreeNAS-generic-pc.gz | dd of=/dev/ad0 bs=512
45056+0 records in
45056+0 records out
23068672 bytes transferred in 35.672522 secs (646679 bytes/sec)

=> No more error message “Invalid argument”… It’s seem good

Then I check the newly installed drive:

# mkdir /mnt/test
# mount /dev/ad0a /mnt/test/
# ls -alh /mnt/test/
total 15293
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 512B Mar 18 16:11 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512B Mar 19 10:30 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 root operator 512B Mar 18 16:11 .snap
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512B Mar 18 16:11 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512B Mar 18 16:11 conf
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 15M Mar 18 16:11 mfsroot.gz

=> no error message “bad descriptor” here… It’s seem very good

then I’ve try to check for difference between the 0.683b and the working 0.684b release:

On the 0.683b:

# sysctl kern.version
kern.version: FreeBSD 6.2-PRERELEASE #0: Sat Jan 13 20:03:15 CET 2007
root@vm.freenas.org:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/FREENAS

# ls -al /usr/bin/gunzip
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 46716 Jan 13 18:08 /usr/bin/gunzip

And on the 0.684b:

# sysctl kern.version
kern.version: FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE #6: Sun Mar 18 13:27:38 UTC 2007
root@dev.freenas.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/FREENAS

Ho ho…. gunzip where replaced by gzip!