Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 19:59:34 -0800 (PST) From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: "Unable to find device node" errors at install Message-ID: <20051206194822.N46094@paz.hyperreal.org>
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I ran into this familiar problem tonight while trying to do a fresh install of 6.0 - the one where during the install process you can successfully create a slice, but then fail to create the partitions. The error when one attempts to write out the partition table is "Unable to find device node /dev/da0s1b in /dev!" After successfully installing Ubuntu on the same box (and having run FreeBSD 4.x on it for years) I figured out it wasn't a hardware or even disk geometry problem. The problem must lie in devfs or in the initialization of the miniroot environment. After the successful disklabel (one big partition type 165) I skipped the partition editor and started a fixit shell. /dev/md0 was mounted as /. I don't know if that's how it is during a partition edit, but I noticed that the only da0 devices in /dev were da0s1a and da0s1c. I don't know enough "mknod" magic or whatever is used to create additional device handles in /dev these days; as a naive installer I shouldn't have to. I went back to the partition editor, created one big partition, da0s1a, and didn't bother creating a swap or secondary partition. The write succeeded, and I could proceed to install FreeBSD 6.0. Since none of the previous attempts at addressing this problem seemed to come up with a clear answer, I thought I would add this information to the fray; it's not a question to be answered but it might help someone who hits this problem again. Or it might even lead to a fix by someone who understands how the installation scripts are supposed to work. Brian
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