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From: Philip Milne <philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 96 11:49:58 +0100
To: hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Nightmare. 
Cc: armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com, charlie_conklin@il.us.swissbank.com
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Hi, we are a small ISP running FreeBSD to power our WEB server and mail  
host. While trying to do a simple exhaustive dump of everything as a crude  
backup we have brought our system down. Our sysadmin is on holiday and  
recommended that we write to you for some clues as to what we can do to  
salvage the situation.

As root we did the following:

tar -cvf /dev/rfd0a /

(We know there are better ways to do dumps but we'd done this before and it  
worked so we thought it would be better than no backup at all - couldn't have  
been more wrong there).

As there were some odd messages appearing in the console this was aborted with:

^C

After that, the system crashed and now, when we try to restart the machine,  
we get the following status report on the console:

*****************************************************************************

Boot:
-

*****************************************************************************

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
	Philip