disapearing devices

I'm installing SuSE 9.1 on an Opteron. The first time I installed this it report errors while formating partitions. "Error: Unable to set up swap on /dev/hda3" etc. It turned out that the /dev/hda1, hda2, hda3 and hda5 were not present on the system. I recreated them using `mknod /dev/hda3 b 3 3` etc and formatted them. The system seems to be fine. I've tested the memory with memtest86. I tried to install the system again but I wasn't able to reproduce the problem. My understanding from poking around during the install is that the device are created at boot and then some are deleted and recreated during the install. Perhaps there is a bug with this code... Has anyone seen something like this? thanks, dan carpenter