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

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 11:58:11PM +0200, Vitaly Magerya wrote:
> Kevin Oberman wrote:
> >> The setup tries to create filesystem and fails with this message:
> >>
> >>     Unable to find device node for /dev/ad0s1b in /dev!
> > 
> > Are you doing a 'W'rite in the labeling tools? I'm guess that you are
> > not, but I wanted to be sure. You don't want to.
> 
> Nope, no write.
> 
> > You say that you are doing the default partitions. If so, the 'b'
> > partition should be swap. It should not get 'newfs'ed. No file system
> > needed (or wanted) there. This tells me that something was wrong in the
> > partition setup if it THINKS that there is a need to newfs partition
> > 'b'. 
> 
> Yes, ad0s1b is the swap, but I think it fails before doing newfs.
> "Writing partition information to ad0" is the last message I see before
> the error occurs, no newfs popups occur.
> 
> >> Aside from debug messages, there's this on second VT:
> >>
> >>     GEOM: ad0: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,63s).
> > 
> > This is a known issue, but cosmetic in almost all cases.
> 
> OK, good.
> 
> > I suspect that you are doing something wrong, but it's hard to figure
> > out just what it might be.
> 
> Anything I can do to see what's the problem?

Can you get this disk into a system (or the same system if booting off
CD, etc.) where you can do the following to it and then retry the
installation?

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=64k count=1

No, this isn't a joke.  This should also clear up the GEOM label
error/warning you see.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |