Did you set the sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 before starting?
Does your user (if not running as root) have write access to /dev/adX?
The dd command is not strictly needed. All it does is wipe out the boot blocks and partition table to make the disk appear as unformatted. It makes the initial fdisk/bsdlabel steps look neater, as you don't have to delete existing info. But it's not crucial to do.
I don't think I've seen those fdisk errors, but it's been several months since I did this at home using slices (the ones I've done at work have been using whole disks, USB and CF). I don't think it's a problem. But you may want to compare the output of fdisk /dev/ad0 and fdisk /dev/ad1 to make sure they are identical, before rebooting.
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