Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 15:22:20 +0200 From: "Waagen, Brit" <brit.waagen@tysver.kommune.no> To: "'freebsd-questions@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Cc: "'tlegvold@c2i.net'" <tlegvold@c2i.net> Subject: Aiiii!!! fsck can't find any superblocks! (long) Message-ID: <319E675B6CFDD21199EC0008C733D60604E001@MAILADM>
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***Please reply to tlegvold@c2i.net****** This is sent from a colleagues work account. Dunno what I did wrong, I've used unix before and am not a total newbie, but new enough to FreeBSD not really to know how to get out of this one. System: Intel Celeron 300A, 64MB core, 17GB Maxtor EIDE disk with 4 partitions: 1:NextStep 2GB, 2: win98 4.5GB, 3:FreeBSD 3.5GB, 4: win98 extended 8GB DPT PM2144UW SCSI card controlling a Seagate Barracuda, Jaz 1GB and Plextor 8x burner Echo Gina AD/DA audio card Terrasound PCI 64 audio/wavetable card (not recommended... :-() ATAPI CD-R PS/2 keyboard Serial mouse (Com1/serial A) ZyXEL Elite 2864i on Com2 (serial B) OS: FreeBSD 4.0-Release (Installed 3.3 from CD, downloaded the floppies for 4.0 and did an FTP upgrade - no errors reported). KDE 1.2. Linux emulation enabled, otherwise a basic novice install with X11 and some developer stuff. Partition layout: in the BSD slice I've set up / (150MB); /var (300MB); swap; /home (1GB); /usr (1GB) and /usr/local (1.2GB). The system has booted and been fine since I installed it a few weeks ago. History/symptoms: I experienced that my extended partition and data (last partition on 17GB EIDE drive) which was set up as a Win98 data drive (I do hard disk recording) "diassapearred" about the same time I installed FreeBSD. Although I don't want to say BSD did anything to my disk, I cannot imagine I knowingly deleting a partition with several hours of recordings for a new project. Moral: backup! I ran Powerquests "Lost & Found" to recover the data, and in order to access the partition had to use (win98) fdisk to create a new extended partition where the old one had been. I didn't format it. Ran L&F, got some of my takes recovered and copied over to a different disk. Restarted the PC into FreeBSD and got loads of errors from fsck when it accessed my /home partition. Ran fsck -y on it (I haven't had time to get much data there, so it was no problem if I lost a few files). Went ok, rebooted, everything seemed ok, no data loss. A week later (last night) I figured I wasn't going to get any more files recovered so I formatted the logical win98 partition from Win98, giving me about 8GB of starage area. Worked a bit and made some new recordings, rebooted to FreeBSD to get my mail and was dumped (again) into a shell because of fsck failures. This time not only my /home partition but also /usr and /usr/local. / seems ok. did a manual fsck of /home and got it clean, but reeboot -n doesn't seem to do what it used to do on other (older) unices - reboot without syncing dirty fs cache data back to the disk. I figured I'd instead fsck all the dirty partitions first and get back to the reboot problem afterwards. When checking /home fsck asked to use alternate superblocks as the first didn't match with the others. This went well (seemingly). However, on /usr and /usr/local fsck cannot find any superblocks at all! I don't know enough about the BSD fs to know where all the alternate superblock adresses are, and they might not be there at all if fsck can't find them. Before I gave up for the evening I ran fdisk from the unix shell to get info on the partitions, it listed something like this (values from my head, not real): part 1: Nextstep, 1992 GB start cyl: 0 size: 84365735 end cyl: 456 part 2: FAT32, 4535 GB start cyl: 457 size:18438347 end cyl: 938 part 3: FreeBSD, 3522 GB start cyl: 939 size: 14735881 end cyl: 1234 part 4: FAT32, 8001 GB start cyl: 0 size: 2565735876 end cyl: Is it normal that an extended/logical partition begins at cyl 0??? I don't recall where the value was for the end cylender, or if one was given. I noticed as well that the total size added up to 18.8GB, while I have a 17.2GB drive... I can boot Win98 and NextStep, unfortunately neither are set up for internet (actually I can browse from Win98 and both browse and receive e-mail (but not send) from Next). I had actually planned on using FreeBSD for most of my non audio computing and had it set up for full internet support. So I can receive answers to this, but will have problems sending anything back... What are my options at this time? Mount /home single user, mount the jaz, make a backup (now I do have lots of files there!) and reinstall everything? Run Partition Magic and adjust partition sizes? I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that somehow Win98 format has written into the BSD partition, thus corrupting it. Or maybe my (reasonably new) disk has big surface errors? What else might be causing this? When I last used FreeBSD and shutdown (CTL-ALT-DELETE) everything shut down smoothly, no errors, no problems. All I've done in between is install (and shortly after remove) BeOS 5 (on the Win98 primary partition) and format the extended/logical Win98 partition. Any advice is more than welcome. Please reply to tlegvold@c2i.net, as I'm sending this from a colleagues machine at work (who knows nothing about computers, or FreeBSD). Regards, Thor Norway To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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