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From: Armando Ferreira <armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 96 10:42:48 +0100
To: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Nightmare.
Cc: Philip Milne <philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.org,
        armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com,
        charlie_conklin@il.us.swissbank.com
References: <4826.839936227@time.cdrom.com>
Reply-To: armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com
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Hi,

The command that I actually used was tar -cvf /dev/rsd0a /

I have since built FreeBSD on a different disk which is working fine. What I  
need to do now, is to check that the /usr partition of the old disk was not  
damaged.

I don't know how to mount the /usr partition of the old disk because I expect  
it to have the same device name as /usr in the new disk.

Is there a way I can distinguish them ?


Thanks for your help,
Armando


Begin forwarded message:

To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc: "Hr.Ladavac" <lada@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at>,  
philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com (Philip Milne), hackers@freebsd.org,  
armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com, charlie_conklin@il.us.swissbank.com
Subject: Re: Nightmare.
From: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk>
Date: 14 Aug 1996 10:17:33 +0100
In-Reply-To: "Jordan K. Hubbard"'s message of Tue, 13 Aug 1996 04:47:48 -0700
Lines: 27
X-Mailer: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.30

"Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> writes:

>
> > > tar -cvf /dev/rfd0a /
> >
> > This has utterly trashed your boot device (and / lies there.)  I seriuosly
> > doubt that you can do anything but reinstall.
>
> Probably the right conclusion, but for the wrong reasons.

Ehh, either I'm missing something really stupid or everyone else is :-)

tar -cvf /dev/rfd0a /

is going to backup the / partition onto a floppy, what's wrong with
that? About the worst that could happen is that rfd0a doesn't exist
and you create a tar archive, at which point tar will say something
like "/usr/bin/tar: /dev/rfd0 is the archive; not dumped" or you fill
a floppy (doesn't gnu tar prompt for new floppies anyway).

I certainly wouldn't expect this command to trash my / partition.

--
  Paul Richards. Originative Solutions Ltd.  (Netcraft Ltd. contractor)
  Elsevier Science TIS online journal project.
  Email: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk
  Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 (0)1865 843155