Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 21:31:50 -0600 From: Ford Prefect <fordp@guide.chi.il.us> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Data Recovery and FreeBSD's fdisk behavior Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19991230213150.0070d220@pop.interaccess.com>
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In an unconcious effort to prove to myself the biggest y2k problem is going
to be with humans, not machines I erased the partition table on my FreeBSD
drive. (I'd go into details about how this happened but I'm sure I sound
stupid enough already :) )
Here's the situation, I was/am triple booting FreeBSD/Win98/WinNT Between
two drives.
The M$ OSes share a 27GB drive, while FreeBSD was running happliy on a 12GB
drive.
In repairing the Windows Drive I made a mistake using M$ FDISK and erased
the FreeBSD partition on the FreeBSD Drive. After cursing a few times, I
decided to do somehting about it. I knew that I had made my whole drive
FreeBSD, and that it wasn't "dangerously dedicated" so I thought the first
thing to try is writing a new partition entry. So I did using a linux disk
I have. (I knew he linux fdisk I had only wrote the partition table, so it
wouldn't corrupt anything extra (providing the MS FDISK didn't erase
anytihng extra))
This worked, mostly. I could once again boot into FreeBSD, and it mounted
MOST of my drives with less complaining than I would have expected. Except
for /usr. /usr has some SUPERBLOCK errors which I can't seem to get rid of.
(failure to read block 16, 17, 18 or something similar, sorry for vaugeness)
I of course know very little about FreeBSD filesystem structure. But I have
an idea of what may be the problem. Though I could be completely wrong
about this. I seem to recall FreeBSD not using ALL of my disk, but rather a
very small portion of it was unused. Since my new partition entry claims to
use everthing, the new partition would be slightly larger than the old.
This might leave a gap at the end of my final slice in that partition which
happens to be /usr.
If that sounds reasonable, I then need to do one of two things:
A) Calculate the partition would be using FreeBSD's fdisk and create a new
entry using that data. and hope it works.
B) Boot off a FreeBSD CD and use its fdisk to write a new partition table
(IE let FreeBSD do B for me)
I prefer B, that it relies on FreeBSD NOT writing anything beyond a
partition table. I don't know if this is the case. (Is it?)
Both rely on my earlier assumptions being true, are they? Are they even
resonable?
Perhaps there are some nice flags for fsck I should be using that would fix
the disk for me?
Any assistance would be appreciated.
I also could use a sugesstions for a good low cost backup solutions that
could be used for say backing up 12Gigs of FreeBSD :)
Again, thanks for any and all assistance in my salvage attempt.
Perhaps I should pay more attention to thos warning messages next time.
-Steve
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