[dnanian]

Making a drive bootable is simply a matter of "blessing" it with the bless command. It's different than actually trying to boot from it. Even a non-bootable drive can be "blessed", and it retains that bootability even if it won't boot when attached to the controller.

It sounds to me like you actually had a series of hardware failures under load. Given that the drive isn't even showing up -- I assume, even the drive itself doesn't show up in Disk Utility (meaning the drive, not the volume) -- I'd be quite concerned that you have significant problems here, and they're not software related...