From owner-freebsd-questions  Sat Oct 14 22:24:58 1995
Return-Path: owner-questions
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id WAA02874
          for questions-outgoing; Sat, 14 Oct 1995 22:24:58 -0700
Received: from apricot.com (scanner@apricot.com [199.125.221.2])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id WAA02868
          for <questions@freebsd.org>; Sat, 14 Oct 1995 22:24:54 -0700
Received: from apricot.com (scanner@localhost) by apricot.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id BAA02603 for <questions@freebsd.org>; Sun, 15 Oct 1995 01:24:55 -0400
Message-Id: <199510150524.BAA02603@apricot.com>
To: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: possible to block out bad media on a partition?
X-URI: http://www.apricot.com/~scanner/
X-Face: 6K2.ZvQgQ.NDQLIx.1pW(xRu*">:}&PX-Ad_!!?wU7H4L"wF"0xEwYu=8Or0V+=5?-eO1XL
 7-0Hom/|]B2C7Uznyol-NVnvEk:+sod^MyB4v4qVpPDemr;b@pZdRSXu.'Gm^t0?2l,j[&t.kbc[UW
 x6Lz^e$K$W
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 01:24:54 -0400
From: Scanner <scanner@apricot.com>
Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

Hello,

I have been a happy user of FreeBSD since around February
of this year and I have finally run in to a case where I wish
the disk tools were more up to what I have been used to on SunOS.

I had a nasty power blip and I have no UPS for my system yet. (Yeah,
yeah, I am going to look at prices this week.)  When the machine
came back up it was unable to come all the way up because it
found a media error that it could not work around on one of the
partitions.

Luckily the partition was only /var (yeah, I like having /var be
its own partition.. ), and also luckily I do daily backups.  So,
after poking around a little bit I made a /usr/var and symlinked
/var to /usr/var, and restored /var off of tape.

Now, I have this 32 meg partition for /var that is unreferenced
(commented out of fstab), and has a media error on it. Is there 
anyway I can format or otherwise re-do just _that one_ partition
to see if I can get it back online?

My setup:

cpu:		intel DX2/66
core:		16meg of ram
devices:	Adaptec 2842A
		3C509
		fairly generic SVGA
		1.44meg 3.5" floppy
scsi dev:	Quantum Empire 2100S
		HP35480A 4mm DAT drive
		Toshiba XM-3501TA cdrom

version:	FreeBSD 2.0.5-RELEASE #0

(What other information would you need?)

I know that this is a pretty much entirely volunteer effort so I
greatly appreciate any help that you can give.

--Scanner	(scanner@apricot.com)