mknod on /dev/hda when it's already a directory - ??

[mark david mcCreary <mdm@one-man-isp.com>]

I've got an old Debian Woody machine that is running fine, but somehow 
/dev/hda has become a directory.

ls -lrta /dev/hd*

displays

...
...
brw-rw----    1 root     disk      34,  76 Mar 14  2002 /dev/hdh12
brw-rw----    1 root     disk      34,  75 Mar 14  2002 /dev/hdh11
brw-rw----    1 root     disk      34,  74 Mar 14  2002 /dev/hdh10
brw-rw----    1 root     disk      34,  65 Mar 14  2002 /dev/hdh1
brw-rw----    1 root     disk      34,  64 Mar 14  2002 /dev/hdh

/dev/hda:
total 23
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         1024 Sep 17  2005 .
drwxr-xr-x    9 root     root        21504 Jan  7 06:47 ..


So when I run lilo, it says

Fatal: open /dev/hda: Is a directory

No idea how this happened or when.  All applications on the machine are 
running fine, but my attempts to create a backup are failing.

So some research shows that this should fix things

mknod /dev/hda b 3 0
chown root:disk /dev/hda
chmod 664 /dev/hda

However, when I do the mknod command, it says

mknod: `/dev/hda': File exists

WHen I try to delete /dev/hda it says

rm -rf /dev/hda

rm: cannot remove directory `hda': Directory not empty

Although the hda directory appears empty to me.

I don't want to get too creative with a working machine.

Does anybody have a suggestion ?

THanks

mark