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

[Bruce Cran]

On Sun, 02 Jan 2011 01:39:13 -0500
Michael Powell <nightrecon at hotmail.com> wrote:

> "Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev! The creation of 
> filesystems will be aborted." Then pressing "OK" brings this:
> "Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting."
> 
> This from sysinstall and occurs after fdisk, labeling, at the point
> when sysinstall then tries to write out the config to the disk and
> newfs.

This can happen if you've had it partitioned using GPT at some point -
in that case you need to use dd to zero the first _and_ last sectors of
the disk.

-- 
Bruce Cran