kern/158637: Cannot reinstall 8.2-RELEASE after HEAD

[Anatoly Mashanov]

>Number:         158637
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       Cannot reinstall 8.2-RELEASE after HEAD
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Jul 04 14:20:10 UTC 2011
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Anatoly Mashanov
>Release:        8.2-RELEASE, 9.0-snapshot 201105
>Organization:
-
>Environment:
Cannot obtain
>Description:
When FreeBSD 9.0-snapshot 201105 (or CVSUPped to HEAD) was previously installed, the 8.2-RELEASE installer refuses to work with messages:

No root device found - you must label a partition as / in the label editor

No swap device found - you should create at least one swap partition. Without swap, the install will fail if you do not have enough RAM. Continue anyway?

Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting.

The commit operation completed with errors. Not updating /etc files.

Additionally, the following symptoms were seen:
1) Installer-partition editor - a - w - q should complain but write the new partition table but after reboot it remains old (with HEAD partition names)
2) Use of gdisk (Norton Ghost Disk under MS-DOS) to create FAT-32 10000 mbytes primary partition out of 60 gbytes disk completes OK, but installer still reports old (HEAD) partition table.

Hardware is OQO-2 (www.oqo.com)

Possible explanation: There is a noncompatible spare partition table somewhere. 
>How-To-Repeat:
See above
>Fix:
Use a third party utility or dd if=/dev/zero of=YOUR_DISK to FULLY diskwipe your disk. Wipe of some per cent beginning will not help.

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: