From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu Sep 14 23:48:10 2000
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Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 08:48:04 +0100
From: "Koster, K.J." <K.J.Koster@kpn.com>
Subject: RE: HELP: Disk/file-systems are loused up
To: 'gerald stoller' <gerald_stoller@hotmail.com>
Cc: 'FreeBSD Hackers mailing list' <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
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>
>      The  fsck  was operating on and reporting on the hard 
> disk; the floppy 
> was not even mounted while I was booting.  Since  fsck  in
> all the variations with which I am familiar didn't fix the
> disk, I am  trying to find another variation or another
> program to run which will complete the job without causing
> any disasters.
>
"The job"? Which job finding or fscking? "the disk"? The floppy or the
harddisk? Please be specific.

If it's an MSDOS floppy, use Windows to find files on it. Windows cares a
whole lot less about broken sectors than FreeBSD does.

You could have a look at mtools (somewhere in the ports), it will allow you
to access the floppy without mounting it, so your system is not going to die
when you use a broken floppy. Mtools do not mount the floppy, so it will
just give you hard sector errors on the console in case of trouble.

If the problem is to restore a broken harddisk filesystem after a crash, and
fsck can't help you, you're in a pile of it (if you'll pardon the
expression). If this is indeed your problem, that is not clear from the
original post you did. I have little experience with restoring screwed
filesystems (I just rebuild and restore backups). Try posting the output of
fsck, or at least the error it's giving you.

>      I also think that the  find  program should be checked 
> to see why it 
> crashed and fix it to keep it from doing similarly in the 
> future; I don't know whom to contact as yet.
>
No matter how broken, a program is unable to crash the OS (well, very, very
unlikely :). If you mount a broken filesystem, FreeBSD will die, find or no
find. I'll bet that you could 'cd' into the broken directory and do 'echo *'
to crash the box.

Kees Jan

================================================
 You are only young once,
       but you can stay immature all your life.


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