Bug 158637

Summary: Cannot reinstall 8.2-RELEASE after HEAD
Product: Base System Reporter: Anatoly Mashanov <thor>
Component: miscAssignee: Mark Linimon <linimon>
Status: Closed Overcome By Events    
Severity: Affects Only Me    
Priority: Normal    
Version: 8.2-RELEASE   
Hardware: Any   
OS: Any   

Description Anatoly Mashanov 2011-07-04 15:20:10 UTC 
When FreeBSD 9.0-snapshot 201105 (or CVSUPped to HEAD) was previously installed, the 8.2-RELEASE installer refuses to work with messages:

No root device found - you must label a partition as / in the label editor

No swap device found - you should create at least one swap partition. Without swap, the install will fail if you do not have enough RAM. Continue anyway?

Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting.

The commit operation completed with errors. Not updating /etc files.

Additionally, the following symptoms were seen:
1) Installer-partition editor - a - w - q should complain but write the new partition table but after reboot it remains old (with HEAD partition names)
2) Use of gdisk (Norton Ghost Disk under MS-DOS) to create FAT-32 10000 mbytes primary partition out of 60 gbytes disk completes OK, but installer still reports old (HEAD) partition table.

Hardware is OQO-2 (www.oqo.com)

Possible explanation: There is a noncompatible spare partition table somewhere.

Fix: 

Use a third party utility or dd if=/dev/zero of=YOUR_DISK to FULLY diskwipe your disk. Wipe of some per cent beginning will not help.
How-To-Repeat: See above
Comment 1 Eitan Adler freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2017-12-31 07:59:47 UTC 
For bugs matching the following criteria:

Status: In Progress Changed: (is less than) 2014-06-01

Reset to default assignee and clear in-progress tags.

Mail being skipped
Comment 2 Mark Linimon freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2021-06-30 00:41:37 UTC 
^Triage: close as OBE.

I'm sorry that this PR did not get addressed in a timely fashion.