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From: Darren Reed <avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Subject: Re: rebuilding trashed disklabel
To: rhwang@mail.io.com
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 07:36:18 +1000 (EST)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199609092010.QAA02289@megazone.bigpanda.com> from "Richard Hwang" at Sep 9, 96 04:10:11 pm
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In some mail from Richard Hwang, sie said:
> 
> I have a drive here (western digital 32500 2.5G ide) on a Dell P6 system with
> 80M RAM which had FreeBSD on it.  (The whole drive was allocated to FreeBSD;
> no multiple boot to other operating systems.)  When I rebooted the system, it
> failed to boot, claiming that I should insert bootable media.  When I checked
> out the disklabel, it looked something like this:
[...]
> I was able to recover wd0a successfully by defining wd0a.  I have a perl
> script which adjusts the partition offsets, writes the disklabel, and tries
> to mount the partition, but realized that it would take forever to finish.
> 
> Is there some easier way to restore the other partitions?

I wrote a program to find and print superblocks on raw partitions for SunOS4
when I did the exact same thing to my boot drive.  I'll see if I can find it
around, but meantime that might give you enough to start with.

Darren