Any suggestion regarding /DEV wipe out on freebsd 4.7?

[babak badaei]

Hello, 
 
A few days ago I was not able to log into my machine using SSH. I got this following message "Server refused to allocate pty". I was, somewhat fortunately, able to log using SCP. So SCP works. The file system looked good for the most part; until I checked out "/DEV". Almost everything was GONE! Including MAKEDEV. Not sure what to do.

Possible clue: Before this happened, last time I was actually logged in via SSH, I ran a dropdb command on one of my postgres databases and got an error message saying I did not have permission to "/DEV/NULL". Not sure what to do, I set permissions to allow write on "NULL". I have done "dropdb" many times before and had never seen that message.

If anyone has any clue as do how I may restore /DEV; or how this could have happened. I would appreciate your input. I am running freeBSD 4.7 with 2GB of memory on an Intel Xeon machine. Only thing left in /DEV is a file for each harddrive partition.

Thanks!