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Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 12:49:14 -0800 (PST)
From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
Reply-To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>
To: Dmitry Morozovsky <marck@woozle.rinet.ru>
cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Getting info from a crashed disk
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On Sun, 2 Nov 1997, Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:

> Hi there, hope you'll never put yourself in a situation similar to mine.
> 
> "FreeBSD woozle.rinet.ru 2.2.5-RELEASE FreeBSD 2.2.5-RELEASE"
> 
> I had an IDE disk on my machine (Quantum FB 1080A, rather old). Some days
> ago i type "pine" and got message complaining about reading my mailbox.
> Moment look at the console got unrecoverable read error message.
> Digging into a problem i found directories /var/mail and /usr/home 
> (yeah! :((() unreadable. System was 2.2.2-R. I install 2.2.5-R on a new disk
> and tried to dump old /usr (mount it readonly) to new disk. dump prints many
> error messages about non-readable disk areas but create dump file.
> However, restore claims that file isn't dump at all.
> 
> Is there a reasonable way to get at least my home directory back?

Restore from backup?  :-( You're not in good shape.  I'd back up what's
important and try a reboot so fsck can fix the damage.  The files are
probably hosed tho.

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major