Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 14:08:09 -0400 From: Mark Conway Wirt <mark@intrepid.net> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Proper disaster recovery techniques Message-ID: <19991018140809.O19075@intrepid.net>
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We have a FreeBSD box that went belly up last night -- it's no longer
bootable. Fortunately, it's not yet a production server, so I wanted
to do the disaster recovery thoughtfully, as opposed to quickly.
The box is 3.1-stable, and it has lost at *least* the bootloader, and
perhaps the root partition. The scary thing is that it wasn't a disk
failure -- all volumes are on the DPT RAID controller, and we didn't
loose RAID. Some software thing must have clobbered the volume, and
that's a Bad Thing.
Anyway, when trying to boot the machine, I get a
Not UFS
no kernel
no /boot/loader
My thoughts are to boot from installation floppy, examine the
partition table, and perhaps re-disklable the root volume. If that
doesn't work, I guess I may have to reinstall the OS and restore
everything from backup tape :-(
Anyone here have experience with really-dead boxes (especially a
similar situation) , and the best way to revive them?
As to the crash itself, I'm at a bit of a loss as to what caused it.
the console displayed:
vm_fault: pagereader, pid 59232 (sshd1)
spec_getpages: I/O read failure (error code = 5)
size: 24576, resid: 24576, a_count 24576 valid 0x0
nread:0 readpage:0 pindex:0 pcount:6
My *guess* is that sshd1 failed because of the OS failure (not the
other way around: the sshd1 daemon overwriting the low sectors), but
that's just a guess.
Thanks!
--Mark
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