can't partition disk?

[Jiann-Ming Su <sujiannming@gmail.com>]

I'm trying to install on my second O2 with the o2-boot.img (Feb 6)
from Martin's site.  Among a few minor issues, the main one I'm having
is the inability of this image to partition the drive that's already
in the O2.  The drive is detected by the kernel and even boots IRIX. 
When I try to manually run fdisk on the virtual console, it simply
says "Unable to open /dev/sda".  dmesg shows:

  SCSI device sda: 8888543 512-byte hdwr sectors (4551 MB)
  SCSI device sda: drive cache: write through
  SCSI device sda: 8888543 512-byte hdwr sectors (4551 MB)
  SCSI device sda: drive cache: write through
  Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun 0

Has anybody else run into this issue?
-- 
Jiann-Ming Su
"I have to decide between two equally frightening options. 
 If I wanted to do that, I'd vote." --Duckman