From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Dec 1 8:16: 4 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 95CA037B404 for ; Sun, 1 Dec 2002 08:16:03 -0800 (PST) Received: from nollie.summersault.com (nollie.summersault.com [208.10.44.140]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 770B043EC2 for ; Sun, 1 Dec 2002 08:16:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mark-dated-1039623361.87ea0e@summersault.com) Received: (qmail 43639 invoked from network); 1 Dec 2002 16:16:01 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO nollie.summersault.com) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 1 Dec 2002 16:16:01 -0000 Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 11:15:58 -0500 (EST) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: requesting help restoring disklabel on unbootable system Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Mark Stosberg X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.65 (Johnstown) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, After an unfortunate sequence of events, my newly successfully upgraded FreeBSD 4.7 machine would not boot anymore and gave me a "boot:" prompt. Returning to the install CD disklabel program, I saw that the only partition it seemed be to finding was the swap partition. I recreated and wrote to disk what I thought was the old disk partitioning scheme (being careful not to newfs anything). After that, the system would boot off the drive, but would not mount /usr, /var or /tmp due to complains of "bad super block: magic number wrong". I suspect that I guess my partition sizes wrong. My questions are: Does this seem like a recoverable situation? If so, how I can restore a correct partition scheme? I have a backup of an old and valid "/etc" directory. (However, without /usr I don't seem to have enough tools to run "tar" to get at it, or use "fdformat" to create a fixit floppy at this point). Thanks! And for the curious, here's how I managed to get into this situation: After I upgraded the OS, I tried to use "sysinstall" to upgrade bash. I think the trouble was, I using bash to run sysinstall, so it failed. I then used "vipw" to upgrade the root shell to something else, but after logging out and back in, I got errors that "couldn't find /usr/local/bin/bash", so I couldn't log into the machine anymore. So then I tried installing bash from the install CD. It didn't seem to be made for this, because machine would consistently reboot in the middle of this install. At some point in debugging this problem, I may have tried to mount the drive using the installer's disklabel problem. Probabbly somewhere been that and the unexpected crashes I lost the partition map on the disk. -mark http://mark.stosberg.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message