Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 15:14:32 -0800 (PST) From: J D <starkruzr1701@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Hi everyone :) Message-ID: <20041214231432.7371.qmail@web41509.mail.yahoo.com>
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Hey, new here. I figured I would subscribe to this list as opposed to
the others because I have something of an odd problem which is directly
related to matters hardware.
Until about a month ago I was running FreeBSD on a DEC AlphaServer
1000, which is an old, relatively inexpensive server system based, of
course, on Digital's Alpha architecture.
Recently, that machine simply stopped working. You hit the power
switch, hear a brief click and spinning up of fans, and the power light
goes off about a second and a half afterward, sans any beeping,
blinking lights or presentation of error information on the machine's
built-in LCD.
In my experience, problems like these are usually caused by power
supplies, which in this machine's case is dazzlingly proprietary with
all kinds of connectors and such coming out of it that I don't
recognize. Realizing that tracking down spare parts for this machine
was going to be extremely difficult, I decided to try the following:
1) Pull the drives out of the machine and remove them from their
cartridge casings
2) Hook them together to an Adaptec 2940 SCSI card
3) Put that into my old PII/400 system
4) Install BSD and hope that somehow I'd be able to mount the disks as
different partitions, get the data out, dump it somewhere safe, and
then start over fresh with my new IDE/SCSI Frankenstein machine.
Naturally, it's step 4 I'm having trouble with.
The machine now recognizes the presence of the three 2GB drives, but
sysinstall's fdisk calls the partitions on them "unused." When I do
"fdisk da0" from a root prompt, however, I get these bits of relevant
data:
fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found
Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
start 63, size 4096512 (2000 Meg), flag 80 (active)
beg: cyl 0/ head1/ sector 1;
end: cyl 254/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
And so on for 3 and 4.
I get the same results for da1 and da2 (including flag 80 (active),
which is somewhat puzzling to me).
So. Be straight with me. Is the data on these drives completely
unrecoverable? Can I do some gymnastics to get it back? I was afraid
in the beginning of this little project that I might have an endianness
issue. Is there some help for this, if true? Wikipedia says this
about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness which makes me think
that possibly my Alpha and PII are different-endian. Can I do anything
about the data that's still on these drives if that's the case?
TIA for any help you can offer. Anyone who wants it, btw, can have any
of the hardware from my Alpha machine if they'd like it :)
JD
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