From owner-freebsd-isp Mon Oct 18 11: 8:35 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from loki.intrepid.net (intrepid.net [204.71.127.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AECE81513F for ; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 11:08:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mark@loki.intrepid.net) Received: (from mark@localhost) by loki.intrepid.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) id OAA28892 for freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 14:08:09 -0400 Message-ID: <19991018140809.O19075@intrepid.net> Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 14:08:09 -0400 From: Mark Conway Wirt To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Proper disaster recovery techniques Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2 Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org We have a FreeBSD box that went belly up last night -- it's no longer bootable. Fortunately, it's not yet a production server, so I wanted to do the disaster recovery thoughtfully, as opposed to quickly. The box is 3.1-stable, and it has lost at *least* the bootloader, and perhaps the root partition. The scary thing is that it wasn't a disk failure -- all volumes are on the DPT RAID controller, and we didn't loose RAID. Some software thing must have clobbered the volume, and that's a Bad Thing. Anyway, when trying to boot the machine, I get a Not UFS no kernel no /boot/loader My thoughts are to boot from installation floppy, examine the partition table, and perhaps re-disklable the root volume. If that doesn't work, I guess I may have to reinstall the OS and restore everything from backup tape :-( Anyone here have experience with really-dead boxes (especially a similar situation) , and the best way to revive them? As to the crash itself, I'm at a bit of a loss as to what caused it. the console displayed: vm_fault: pagereader, pid 59232 (sshd1) spec_getpages: I/O read failure (error code = 5) size: 24576, resid: 24576, a_count 24576 valid 0x0 nread:0 readpage:0 pindex:0 pcount:6 My *guess* is that sshd1 failed because of the OS failure (not the other way around: the sshd1 daemon overwriting the low sectors), but that's just a guess. Thanks! --Mark To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message