From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Aug 13 04:27:06 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id EAA08601 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 13 Aug 1996 04:27:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from eins.siemens.at (eins.siemens.at [193.81.246.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id EAA08588 for ; Tue, 13 Aug 1996 04:26:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sol1.gud.siemens.co.at (root@firix [10.1.143.100]) by eins.siemens.at (8.7.4/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA27683 for ; Tue, 13 Aug 1996 13:25:48 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at by sol1.gud.siemens.co.at with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #7 for ) id m0uqHbZ-000263C; Tue, 13 Aug 96 13:25 MET DST Received: by ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at (1.37.109.16/1.37) id AA272325361; Tue, 13 Aug 1996 13:22:41 +0200 From: "Hr.Ladavac" Message-Id: <199608131122.AA272325361@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at> Subject: Re: Nightmare. To: philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com (Philip Milne) Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 13:22:41 +0200 (MESZ) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org, armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com, charlie_conklin@il.us.swissbank.com In-Reply-To: <9608131050.AA02567@ln1d273nwk> from "Philip Milne" at Aug 13, 96 11:49:58 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8a] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk E-mail message from Philip Milne contained: > Hi, we are a small ISP running FreeBSD to power our WEB server and mail > host. While trying to do a simple exhaustive dump of everything as a crude > backup we have brought our system down. Our sysadmin is on holiday and > recommended that we write to you for some clues as to what we can do to > salvage the situation. > > As root we did the following: > > tar -cvf /dev/rfd0a / This has utterly trashed your boot device (and / lies there.) I seriuosly doubt that you can do anything but reinstall. What happened is that you have overwritten the filesystem layout from the same filesystem you were "backing up" and at that *while* you were backing it up. There shouldn't be anything useful on /dev/rfd0a. You will need to newfs / again and reinstall. With luck your other directories (/usr, /var, ...) are on separate partitions. However, everything that was in /etc is gone. > > (We know there are better ways to do dumps but we'd done this before and it > worked so we thought it would be better than no backup at all - couldn't have ^^^^^^^^ This I doubt. > been more wrong there). > > > Boot: > - Of course, there is no filesystem where /kernel used to be. /Marino