Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:03:35 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au> To: J D <starkruzr1701@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hi everyone :) Message-ID: <20041215070334.GA90262@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au> In-Reply-To: <20041214231432.7371.qmail@web41509.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20041214231432.7371.qmail@web41509.mail.yahoo.com>
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On Tue, 2004-Dec-14 15:14:32 -0800, J D wrote: >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. Alpha hardware is sufficiently uncommon that it's also discussed on -alpha. >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. That sounds like a PSU problem. I agree that trying to buy a new one would be impractical (and uneconomic). If you know someone with some hardware skills, it may be repairable - the inside probably won't be that peculiar. >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: The problem is that Alpha disks don't have a PC-style partition table. >So. Be straight with me. Is the data on these drives completely >unrecoverable? Can I do some gymnastics to get it back? The data is still there and should be recoverable. Rather than using sysinstall, try installing the disks onto a functional FreeBSD system and try "disklabel daN". You should be able to mount those partitions. >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. The Alpha is theoretically bytesexual but, AFAIK, only little-endian Alpha systems exist. Your A1000 is definitely little-endian - which matches your P-II. The only issue you might bump into is that longs are 32-bits on i386 and 64-bits on Alpha, though all the on-disk structures are fixed sizes so this won't affect mounting the disk. >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 :) You might like to offer this in -alpha and give an indication of where you are (since an A1000 is not compact). -- Peter Jeremy
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