Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 19:38:29 +0300 From: Oleg N Panashchenko <helg@tav.kiev.ua> To: philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com (Philip Milne) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Nightmare. Message-ID: <199608141638.TAA01369@tav.kiev.ua>
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In article <9608131050.AA02567@ln1d273nwk> you wrote:
: 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 /
About a week ago I have accidentally wiped start of FreeBSD patrition
too. Fortunately I was able to recover /usr and /var partitions and
had a backup of /etc, so I did not loose too much.
First of all, I had a tiny FreeBSD partition at another HDD.
All other disk space was used for Dos/Windows at that machine.
I was able to connect HDD with broken start of FreeBSD partition
to this machine.
With DOS diskedit.exe I was able to find where /usr and /var partitions
start by seraching for "/usr\0" and "/var\0" through whole HDD. Then
I calculated sizes of / /swap /usr and /var partitions. Fortunately
I remembered that sizes of all but last partitions were set to integer
number of megabytes.
Then I booted tiny FreeBSD, ran /stand/sysinstall, created / /swap
/usr and /var subsystems with calculated/remembered size at broken
FreeBSD partition (via menu custom->label) and "Toggle NewFS" option there
to "No" - to preserve wiping data.
After writing changes to disk and rebooting, I was able to mount /usr
and /var, say newfs to / and restore /etc. Then I made a total system
backup :)
Oleg
: (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
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