From owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Dec 14 23:14:32 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 64D7B16A4CE for ; Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:14:32 +0000 (GMT) Received: from web41509.mail.yahoo.com (web41509.mail.yahoo.com [66.218.93.92]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 44B6143D1F for ; Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:14:32 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from starkruzr1701@yahoo.com) Received: (qmail 7373 invoked by uid 60001); 14 Dec 2004 23:14:32 -0000 Comment: DomainKeys? See http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; b=rjyS0iF3osPr2yNd10pYcb3GVa8t/OXb5JWbMtAgw5cgOFnIZq1wfEorx1uS1iHHYT/OylWHsKLbVAAGJQ5kRmEReTVQyvnAQYn9SHNWJ7TmrtkfSxAP19UwWBVseKnwxZbCdk3iruMWH4Fc47TfP102qv7+qSDfzU3MW+Ja0Ic= ; Message-ID: <20041214231432.7371.qmail@web41509.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [69.22.204.254] by web41509.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Tue, 14 Dec 2004 15:14:32 PST Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 15:14:32 -0800 (PST) From: J D To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Subject: Hi everyone :) X-BeenThere: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: General discussion of FreeBSD hardware List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:14:32 -0000 Hey, new here. I figured I would subscribe to this list as opposed to the others because I have something of an odd problem which is directly related to matters hardware. Until about a month ago I was running FreeBSD on a DEC AlphaServer 1000, which is an old, relatively inexpensive server system based, of course, on Digital's Alpha architecture. Recently, that machine simply stopped working. You hit the power switch, hear a brief click and spinning up of fans, and the power light goes off about a second and a half afterward, sans any beeping, blinking lights or presentation of error information on the machine's built-in LCD. In my experience, problems like these are usually caused by power supplies, which in this machine's case is dazzlingly proprietary with all kinds of connectors and such coming out of it that I don't recognize. Realizing that tracking down spare parts for this machine was going to be extremely difficult, I decided to try the following: 1) Pull the drives out of the machine and remove them from their cartridge casings 2) Hook them together to an Adaptec 2940 SCSI card 3) Put that into my old PII/400 system 4) Install BSD and hope that somehow I'd be able to mount the disks as different partitions, get the data out, dump it somewhere safe, and then start over fresh with my new IDE/SCSI Frankenstein machine. Naturally, it's step 4 I'm having trouble with. The machine now recognizes the presence of the three 2GB drives, but sysinstall's fdisk calls the partitions on them "unused." When I do "fdisk da0" from a root prompt, however, I get these bits of relevant data: fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found Media sector size is 512 Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1 The data for partition 1 is: sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD) start 63, size 4096512 (2000 Meg), flag 80 (active) beg: cyl 0/ head1/ sector 1; end: cyl 254/ head 254/ sector 63 The data for partition 2 is: And so on for 3 and 4. I get the same results for da1 and da2 (including flag 80 (active), which is somewhat puzzling to me). So. Be straight with me. Is the data on these drives completely unrecoverable? Can I do some gymnastics to get it back? I was afraid in the beginning of this little project that I might have an endianness issue. Is there some help for this, if true? Wikipedia says this about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness which makes me think that possibly my Alpha and PII are different-endian. Can I do anything about the data that's still on these drives if that's the case? TIA for any help you can offer. Anyone who wants it, btw, can have any of the hardware from my Alpha machine if they'd like it :) JD __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250