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Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 06:57:07 -0400
From: Thomas David Rivers <ponds!rivers@dg-rtp.dg.com>
Message-Id: <199510051057.GAA21537@lakes>
To: ic.net!rdm@dg-rtp.dg.com, freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: system crash - help!
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Rob Misiak (<dg-rtp!ic.net!rdm@dg-rtp>) writes:
> Terry Lambert ("Re: system crash - help!") wrote:
> > 
> > > Ok, in case anyone is interested, I fixed the problem. What happened is
> > > fsck (I think that's what did this) marked some files - including /etc/ttys
> > > (causing the login problem) and /etc/hosts - character devices. I luckily
> > > had the 2.0.5-release CD lying around, so I replaced all of the messed up
> > > files
> > 
> > What do you mean "marked"... you mean "moved to lost+found"?  I hope?
> > 
> > 
> 
> Unfortunately, no. The files were in the same places that they normally were,
> except (according to ls -l) they were character devices. It happened to many
> random files all over the / partition. Fortunately, I kept backups and I was
> able to restore the files.
> 
> Rob
> 

 I have just had a recent confirmation of this phenomena (much to
my chagrin.)

 On a FreeBSD 2.0.5 system, running the distributed GENERIC kernel;
on a 386dx-33 with 8meg, NE2000 ether, HGA screen, AHA1542B w/
an old micropolis 635meg driver.

 I walked in the office and the machine had mysteriously rebooted,
although the machine next to it hadn't.

 The fsck during the reboot had failed, dropping me into the `sh'.

 When running the fsck myself, I discovered that just about every
file in /dev had been scribbled over (like the inode for the
directory had been mucked-around.)

 This wasn't so bad, since I could recover MAKEDEV and reconstruct
the /dev directory.

 Interestingly enough, several files become immutable in this
process, making it a pain to get rid of the old /dev directory
when everything was back up-and-running.

 I just wanted to echo Rod's observations.

 Also, I wanted to make sure there wasn't a problem with the drive
itself.  I dropped into the Adaptect BIOS routines and asked for
a SCSI verify.  No problems on the driver were located/remapped.

 Finally, the machine has been running since a week after the 2.0.5
release, without seeing this problem.  It saw this problem about
once a month with the 2.0 release.

 Of course, this could all be associated with an aging drive dropping
bits every-now-and-then.

	- Dave Rivers -