From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Apr 19  3:47:54 2000
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Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 03:47:48 -0700
From: "J.D. Falk" <jdfalk@mail-abuse.org>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Corrupted disk label and related issues
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	Yesterday a drive which I'd been meaning to replace died in
	a generally unhappy manner -- after much research and general
	(mostly unrelated) replacement of hardware, I (with help from
	some friends) tracked it down to disklabel problems and did
	a bunch of work trying to fix that.

	The way things stand now, `disklabel -r ad3` comes up with
	the correct information about eight times out of ten; other
	times, it'll say "bad pack magic number (label is damaged,
	or pack is unlabeled)".

	I managed to dd the entire contents of the disk to another,
	more functional slice elsewhere.  So, the data is still all
	there in one form or another.  If I could find out the exact
	start (after boot foo) of the partitions, I could dd each of
	them seperately and work from there, but I'm not sure if it'd
	really buy me all that much.

	Another possible datapoint: attempting to mount or fsck any
	of the partitions will, more often than not, result in a
	"Device not configured" message.

	My main goal at this point, after more than sixteen hours
	of working on it and nearly 25 hours of downtime -- is to
	regain the data.  If anyone could offer advice, I sure would
	appreciate it.  I have a feeling that I'm missing something
	simple -- I used to be a sysadmin, but I never had this kind
	of problem with a BSD system before.  *sigh*

	(Note: the machine in question is my own, not my employer's.)

-- 
J.D. Falk                                             "Laughter is the sound
Product Manager                          that knowledge makes when it's born."
Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC                  -- The Cluetrain Manifesto


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