From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 14 23:43:11 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (cfedde.dsl.frii.net [216.17.139.141]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B8F8C37B402 for ; Mon, 14 Jan 2002 23:43:08 -0800 (PST) Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fedde.littleton.co.us (8.11.6/8.11.4) with ESMTP id g0F7h4874157; Tue, 15 Jan 2002 00:43:04 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <200201150743.g0F7h4874157@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: "Joe Parks" Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Help! No longer booting, trying to recover.. In-Reply-To: From: Chris Fedde Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 00:43:04 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 14 Jan 2002 22:10:34 -0700 "Joe Parks" wrote: +------------------ | 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. +------------------ At best you have just lost the boot block and disklabel. You should be able to re-create these by booting to the fixit CD and use the bsd version of fdisk and disklabel to re-create it. /stand/sysinstall wraps a menuing shell around these (and other) functions that might help. If it is just the boot block that is gone then /stand/sysinstall might be just what you need. +------------------ | 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. +------------------ If the superblock is intact you may have some luck using fsdb(8) to find your data. But even doing that you need to have a good disklabel and device files. There is a slim chance that you might be able to find your data by using clever combinations of dd and grep. But I have yet to see this work. -- Chris Fedde To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message