From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Dec 30 20:34: 0 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from postal.interaccess.com (postal.interaccess.com [207.208.133.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D41B81524B for ; Thu, 30 Dec 1999 20:33:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from fordp@guide.chi.il.us) Received: from Zaphod (d1.focal6.interaccess.com [207.208.186.1]) by postal.interaccess.com (8.9.0/8.9.0) with SMTP id WAA03029 for ; Thu, 30 Dec 1999 22:34:20 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <3.0.3.32.19991230213150.0070d220@pop.interaccess.com> X-Sender: fordp@pop.interaccess.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.3 (32) Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 21:31:50 -0600 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org From: Ford Prefect Subject: Data Recovery and FreeBSD's fdisk behavior Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 *=====================================================* \ Ford Prefect Ahead of my time. \ \ fordp@guide.chi.il.us but only by a week. \ \ homepage.interaccess.com/~fordp \ \ \ \ ((In esperanto where available)) \ *=====================================================* To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message