Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 13:25:07 +0100 From: "Lars G. Erlandsen" <lerland@icrt.demon.co.uk> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Help: FreeBSD 2.1 'mount' fails on 2.0 SCSI partition Message-ID: <lUZfXCAjg72xEw5Y@icrt.demon.co.uk>
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I've grown up on Sun Workstations, and developed a strong liking for BSD Unix. During my ten years of developing software for various companies, it was the one dependable and solid workhorse that always got the job done. FreeBSD was the ultimate dream: BSD Unix at home. It has run for over 2 years (first version 1.5, and over the last 2 years, version 2.0), and there are very few things it can't do. It's a superb environment, and one I've grown to like and respect. The system I have successfully run an maintained, is a FreeBSD 2.0 system that has been uncomfortably straddled across one IDE and one SCSI disk on my home computer. It started its life as a 2nd partition on the IDE drive (Messy-Dross and Windows 'Paines' occupying the first), but quickly ran out of space. I used '/stand/sysinstall' to partition up a bigger Conner 1 Gbyte SCSI disk (controlled from an Adaptek 2942 board) later, then 'mkfs' to format the partitions, then tar'ed over the original partitions. However, as I've learned later, tar is no good on special files, so I never managed to boot from the SCSI disk. In the end, I booted from the IDE disk, but had /usr mounted on the SCSI disk (and importantly, the /usr/home partition for all my software). Recently I acquired a bigger IDE disk, and decided it was time to do the job properly, and for starters use the better partition naming to have swap, root, usr and home partitions on separate slices. Also, my FreeBSD was more than 2 years old, and in need of a facelift (not the least because of the FreeBSD version 2.1 support for SoundBlaster Panasonic CD-ROM drives). I've also since installed both Linux, OS/2 and Boot Manager for curiosity reasons, but that is not part of the story. All has gone well, except that FDISK decided to pick its own default and try and grab the whole IDE drive, FreeBSD and all, for partitioning, on my old IDE drive. Of course this was discovered only during DOS FORMAT later. The FreeBSD partitionwas lost. I wasn't unduly worried, as I had disconnected the SCSI disk during this, knowing the generally mean behaviour of FDISK. Hence the /usr portion (and more importantly /usr/home) should be OK. FreeBSD 2.1 was installed from CD-ROM without problems on the new IDE drive. However, shock horror, it gets into fits when I'm manually trying to mount the SCSI disk, complaining about overlapping partitions, in particular '/dev/sd1s1d' (yes, I've got two SCSI disks as well, now!). Ironically, it then mounts the root partition, which is -- a) the partition that is not in a fit state, anyway after just a tar, and b) not the one I need. The usr partition is not accessible. But 'fsck' finds everything, and reports no problems when I run it on the unmounted SCSI slice, though (I think). At this point, I can see that I have 6 different options for digging out the home partition (the 7th one - scrapping everything - is for now a non-starter), but for all of them there are vital pieces in the jigsaw puzzle missing: 1. Assume that I partitioned it wrongly when I made it. Action: Use 'disklabel -w -r <disk>' to handpatch it. Problem: I haven't got enough knowledge to change the values and get it right, and if I get it wrong, the partitions **REALLY** are busted. 2. Assume the FreeBSD 2.1 team have changed the partitioning software sufficiently to make it non-portable between 2.0 and 2.1 (not unreasonable given the added functionality it now offers on the partitioning). Action: Rely on some migration tool/information/procedures to change the layout sufficiently. Problem: Don't know where to find it. Action II: Mount in a 2.0-ish compatible fashion? Problem: Don't know how. 3. Mount individual partitions within the SCSI slice to rescue the /usr portion. Problem: Don't know how. 4. Ask 'mount' to ignore errors, and try and make the best of it, anyway. With such large partitions (500 Mbyte /usr), there should be several super-blocks to read and make sense of. I only need one lucky break to tar the interesting bits to a DOS partition or something. Problem: Don't know how to inform 'mount' to do that. 5. Try and 'hide' all other BSD partitions (set the type to something unknown), and try and force it to boot from the SCSI disk. Tried it - boot program can't find /kernel, so the partition isn't sane enough to boot. 6. Re-create a BSD 2.0 installation again, and see if it understands the partitioning on the SCSI disk when I mount it manually later. Action: Build from CD-ROM again. Problem: My FreeBSD 2.0 CD-ROM has a damaged boot floppy image. I didn't have the patience to return the CD-ROM to Walnut Creek and wait for a replacement when I got it, so last time I dug out an old 5.25" floppy drive and managed to get it to boot on the 1.2M floppy image. Action II: Get new boot floppy image from Walnut Creek. Problem: Tried that this morning, but version 2.0 now seems so old that they don't hold an image of the CD-ROM any more. So, where do I go from here? Could somebody please give me a few clues about how to use various system utilities to mend the slice? or to ask FreeBSD 2.1 to be forgiving when mounting? Any documentation on the slicing changes between 2.0 and 2.1? Failing all that, does anybody know where I can download a FreBSD 2.0 boot and cpio floppy? Thanks for all help. Regards, Lars G. Erlandsen, Inter-Connect RealTime Ltd. email lerland@icrt.demon.co.uk
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