Okay, there's a fresh set of v9 installers on the site now. These worked for me here a moment ago, and I'm rerunning them again now just for background pleasure.

The rather simple workaround is to block all early writes to the raw disk device /dev/hda, unless it lacks a valid empeg partition layout, and allow everything else to pass through.

Nice cool feedback on the "pumping" now, too. One can even see where the upgrader suppresses sending long streams of zeros over the serial link.

That'll do it for now.

-ml