a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop

[Michael Powell]

Chris Brennan wrote:

> I've got an HP Business Class laptop (dv2700) and the original 250G SATAII
> drive is going bad. So I bought a new drive, got a great deal on an SATAII
> 750G drive for it, bios sees the drive fine. The old drive had
> FBSD8.2/amd64 installed and it ran fine. I wanted to reinstall to make
> some partition changes anyway so when I tossed in any install medium I get
> the following error
> 
> 'Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in dev! The creation of
> filesystems will be aborted.'
> 
> I didn't select anything crazy and accepted defaults for everything. I
> figured out the advanced bios option and am in the bios now letting the
> bios' smart features run there tests (and it just shut down on me, this
> happens in the winter when the heat is on :( ). Anyway, gonna let it cool
> down and try the smart tests again. Incidentally, I was able to boot a
> gentoo disc and set up an ext4 filesystem on the same disk and it worked
> fine, so I don't understand why freebsd can't preform a newfs on the
> drive. _______________________________________________


Try zeroing out the mbr:

Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: 

sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16  and:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 

where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR.

I have seen this exact error before, and this is what took care of it.

-Mike