From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Oct 18 18:51:48 2000
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Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 20:50:19 -0500
To: Siegbert Baude <siegbert.baude@gmx.de>
From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>
Subject: Re: Help, I can't boot FreeBSD anymore
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <39EE4006.EA90F89B@gmx.de>
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Thank you. The problem seems solved <whew>, though I'm not quite sure why.
I decided to boot again, and went to read a book for a while.

When I came back, the system was finally booted, but acted eratic. df
claimed my 8 Gig drive was 108% full. I deleted entire directories, but df
kept reporting the same. I ran MAKEDEV all. It recreated /dev/null, thank
goodness, before it failed for lack of disk space. The hard disk LED was
just churning (or rather the disk was, the LED was blinking like crazy).

I typed "reboot". After a long period of disk syncing, the system did
reboot, though it said / was not dismounted properly (that would be the 8
Gig drive). However, it booted fairly quickly, df reported the big drive
was 21% full, and everything was fine and dandy. Also /dev/null seems
working right. I tried the same as before (tags 9999999 > /dev/null), and
it worked as it was supposed to.

So, I can go back to programming again. I am not sure what the heck
happened (or for that matter how my /dev/null turned into a file), but as
long as everything is working I'm happy. :)

Thanks for your help,

Adam

At 02:27 19-10-2000 +0200, Siegbert Baude wrote:
>Hi,
>
>> To my surprise, null was actually a huge file filled with tabs. I deleted
>> it (rm null), then I did ln -s zero null.
>
>I think that induced your problem. /dev/zero and /dev/null aren=B4t=
 identical.
>>From /dev/MAKEDEV
>
>mknod null      c 2 2;                  chmod 666 null=20
>mknod zero      c 2 12;                 chmod 666 zero=20
>
>Sorry, but I don=B4t know, where in the boot process you would need
/dev/null the
>first time, so I don=B4t know, where your boot hangs. I suggest to use a=
 fixit
>floppy, mount / && cd /dev && ./MAKEDEV null
>
>I have no clue, why your first step didn=B4t send your bytes to Nirvana and
>instead created a normal file containing your input.
>
>Any suggestions?
>
>Ciao
>Siegbert
>
>


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