8.0 install fails to create filesystem ("unable to find device node")

Vitaly Magerya vmagerya at gmail.com
Tue Feb 2 19:52:16 UTC 2010


Greetings everyone. I'm trying to install FreeBSD 8.0 from Disk1 on
ThinkPad T40, so far unsuccessfully.

Here are the setup steps:
Installer complains that "77520/16/63" may not be a good geometry for
ad0, proposes "4864/255/63" instead (both eventually lead to failure).
I create a single disk-wide slice (ad0s1), choose a boot manager, set up
standard labeling for ad0s1, choose distributions.
The setup tries to create filesystem and fails with this message:

    Unable to find device node for /dev/ad0s1b in /dev!

Aside from debug messages, there's this on second VT:

    GEOM: ad0: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,63s).

I also tried to setup 7.0 (w/o dangerously dedicated slicing), and then
freebsd-update to 8.0. On first reboot required by freebsd-update the
system drops to bootloader prompt and fails to find init on any of the
filesystems.

Help. Is there anything I can do to install 8.0?

The dmesg of this machine (as seen by 7.0) is at [1]. I'll provide any
further information -- just name it.

[1] http://tx97.net/~magv/dmesg-t40.70.txt


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