From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 21 16:39:25 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3B2E816A41F for ; Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:39:25 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from phadley@village.com) Received: from 35260.ds.nac.net (35260.ds.nac.net [209.123.8.186]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 628D443D5D for ; Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:39:16 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from phadley@village.com) Received: from [192.168.2.98] (ol2-24.217.87.17.charter-stl.com [24.217.87.17]) by 35260.ds.nac.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 36B7D57AAA for ; Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:40:22 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <42DFCFB3.2070009@village.com> Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 11:39:15 -0500 From: "Peter K. Hadley" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050101 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Subject: Gaining access to disks made inaccessible X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:39:25 -0000 I have made my machine unbootable. I installed FreeBSD on ad0s2, a partition of one physical hard drive. I put most of my working data on ad1s2, a partition of another much larger hard drive. I then created links from /home, /etc, and /usr to the second drive. This worked well until the power outages. The second drive was always sufficiently well corrupted that it refused to be mounted. Because fstab failed, booting quit. This was cured by fsck but I was hoping to run the machine headless as good discipline for a real server so I had to grab the keyboard from another machine in a geometrically compromised setting and use it. To forestall this problem, I edited fstab to make the second disk noauto. At the very next power outage, it started booting and did quite well at it until it tried to grab a terminal from /usr. This was linked to the now unmounted disk. I had no obvious way of getting a command prompt to mount the disk. I stumbled on the Fixit disk and it was fun but after fsck it could find only lost+found on the drive and never could mount the first drive (bad superblock). I couldn't even fsck it. Is there some way to get at either /etc/fstab or to rearrange all those links so that I can get everything? All I want is access to / on the first disk. From there I should be able to rearrange things so the machine is usable and then I can mess it up in a new way. I think in the future, I'll have /usr in the directory where I mount the second drive. That way it will be there until I place the new one over it. If that doesn't work, I think I'll just have only /home on the second drive and live with it. Thank-you for listening and I thank you for any advice, especially advice that works.