devfs and slices on Iomega ZIP media

[Stefan Walter]

Doug White, 11.04.03, 02:09h CEST:

> > is there a way to make devfs rescan the partition table of a device?
> > Currently (i.e. 5.0-RELEASE with me), I cannot access ZIP disks if there
> > wasn't any medium in the ZIP drive at boot time, as devfs doesn't create
> > the device files for the slices (which is understandable, as there
> > weren't any slice then). "camcontrol rescan" (it's a SCSI device)
> > apparently just scans for devices and doesn't help with creating the
> > slices' device files.
> 
> don't they just auto-clone themselves?

How? The device files are and remain missing, no matter what I do.
In my case, /dev/da1s4 (for DOS/Windows formatted media) is missing if
there wasn't any ZIP disk in the drive at boot time:

stefan at kyuzo> ls /dev/da1*
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,  14 Apr 11 08:51 /dev/da1
stefan at kyuzo> mdir y:
Can't open /dev/da1s4: No such file or directory
Cannot initialize 'Y:'
stefan at kyuzo> sudo touch /dev/da1s4
Password:
touch: /dev/da1s4: Operation not supported

Maybe I'm missing something obvious. If that's the case, a hint would be
nice.

Stefan