Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 22:10:34 -0700 From: "Joe Parks" <pleaseworky@hotmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Help! No longer booting, trying to recover.. Message-ID: <F733L9BGTuAyHsjCGvs000004e6@hotmail.com>
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I am running FreeBSD 4.4. Today I booted and was given the F1, F2... menu and after it timed out and went to the default choice, it gave an error message and did not boot. So I reset the computer, and now it no longer even goes to the F1, F2... menu, instead it just immediately tells me Operating System Not Found. So, I booted off an msdos boot disk, just to see if the disk was still there, and I can see it in msdos fdisk, but msdos fdisk reports that there are no partitions defined at all. I did not alter the disk in any way with msdos fdisk, just viewed it and quit. So, I then booted FreeBSD floppies and went into the fixit disk. dmesg gave no errors about the disk at all. So this is what I tried: mknod /dev/ad0a c 116 0 ; mknod /dev/ad0c c 116 2 mkdir /mount ; mount /dev/ad0a /mount And I received the error: mount: /dev/ad0a on /mount: incorrect super block Ok. So then I did a `disklabel -e /dev/ad0c` and I got the error: disklabel: ioctl DIOCGDINFO: invalid argument So that's that. I created the /dev nodes in /dev of the fixit disk and tried to mount it based on those, and when that failed I tried to at least view the disk label. I did try one more thing, I tried to `vi /dev/ad0` (and also ad0a and ad0c) just to see if you could vi the device itself and see data but all three were empty files. I only need ONE text file off this drive. Everything else I don't care about at all. So my questions are these: 1. what do you think of this situation ? especially the part about the first boot making it to F1 then dying, and all subsequent boots not even making it to F1. 2. Is there anything I can do ? Like I said, I just need one small text file off the drive - nothing else matters. That is why I was trying to vi the raw devices - to see if I could get to the text file and just copy it by hand. 3. Should I disklabel -B -r /dev/ad0c in an attempt to give it a new boot area ? Or am I risking any of my data by doing this ? 4. Finally, was I completely misguided in trying to vi the device files, and if NOT, is there any other tricky kind of way I can try to get just the one text file I need ? Remember,I don't need to recover the drive (although it would be nice) I just need that one text file. thank you ever so much for any help. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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