Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:40:57 +0200 From: Ruben de Groot <mail25@bzerk.org> To: PJ <af.gourmet@videotron.ca> Cc: Roland Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl>, Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, wmoran@potentialtech.com, Ian Smith <smithi@nimnet.asn.au> Subject: Re: boot sector f*ed Message-ID: <20090813174057.GA1517@ei.bzerk.org> In-Reply-To: <4A841AC2.1050809@videotron.ca> References: <20090811173211.6FE4D106567B@hub.freebsd.org> <20090812193008.F19821@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <4A82A8D9.30406@videotron.ca> <20090812172704.GA27066@slackbox.xs4all.nl> <4A831DF7.9090506@videotron.ca> <20090812232810.GA37833@slackbox.xs4all.nl> <4A841AC2.1050809@videotron.ca>
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Hi PJ, On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 09:53:06AM -0400, PJ typed: > I apologize for the lengthy explanation below, but perhaps it will give > some insight on what is see from this end: You probably won't get much helpfull response. When troubleshooting, it's allways best to try to break down the problem in tiny bits and solve them one by one, asking specific questions when you get stuck. <snip> > to be in a position to do what is required. For one thing, I do not know > how I can save testing output to an external file when I am working on a > temporary shell on the problem machine. Perhaps you could indicate what > I should be doing or where to look for information. What kind of "temporary shell"? You mean the fixit console or livecd? You can allways redirect the output to some file in /tmp for example and then scp it to another computer. Or mount_nfs or even mount_smbfs a windows share and save the output there. > And in checking the disks with fdisk, fsck, and even running that weird > regenerate progam... I wasn't able to come up with anything > significant... that is, the configuration of the disks seemed to be ok, > the boot sector was ok as it was able to boot but the when the system > was being mounted something went wrong... and looking back, I vaguely > recall something about a "soft update" or something like that which > seems to indicate some stumbling block in the software and not hardware. soft updates inconsistencies perhaps? They can be caused by faulty hardware. Or by power failure. What did you do about them? In such a situation the system will drop you into single user mode where you can do an fsck. > All that I am seeing is that there is either a problem with the bios > (which I even reinstalled and that changed nothing in the functioning) > or something is going on with the OS. How exactly did you see this? And you reinstalled the BIOS ??? > I now have set up another instance of 7.2 on a different disk on the > 2.4ghz machine and I already find something strange... after installing > the minimum configuration, I installed the packages - samba3.3.3, > cvsup-without-gui, and smartmontools. I tried to run smartctl and cvsup > but nothing worked. The path variable was correct but the shell just > would not pick up on it. I had to start the programs from their directories. > That just doesn't make sense. It does if your shell is csh (the default shell for root). You must issue the "rehash" command to re-read everything in your path after installing new software. Ruben
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