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Date:      Fri, 29 Nov 2002 18:45:48 +0200
From:      Vallo Kallaste <kalts@estpak.ee>
To:        Wesley Morgan <morganw@chemikals.org>
Cc:        current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Harry Potter and the Disappearing Disklabel
Message-ID:  <20021129164548.GA2400@tiiu.internal>
In-Reply-To: <20021129093417.V7358-100000@volatile.chemikals.org>
References:  <20021129093417.V7358-100000@volatile.chemikals.org>

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On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 09:41:56AM -0500, Wesley Morgan
<morganw@chemikals.org> wrote:

> Yesterday morning I was having some trouble with XFree consuming much more
> cpu time than necessary... A truss showed that some kind of shared memory
> issue going on, but also froze my system hard. After rebooting (kernel was
> from Nov 26 or 27) fsck could not check my one dirty UFS2 partition. Had
> to newfs and mtree to recreate /var. No big deal, and I saved an image of
> it beforehand.
> 
> After rebooting, there was... NOTHING. GRUB errored out and wouldn't boot.
> Nothing could see my partitions. After a minimal 4.7-R install (DP2
> disklabel whined about offsets and some other STRANGE error messages,
> so I went with 4.7) on a small fat32 partition, I discovered that the
> disklabel was empty. Had to edit it by hand... Booted up fine, made
> a backup, rebooted, and nothing. Not only was there NOTHING, but the
> disklabel on the new 4.7 install had vanished as well. This time the
> disklabel had to be recreated with -w -r AND the boot blocks had to be
> reinstalled.
> 
> I've seen one post similar to this, but not much else. I think maybe the
> UFS2 problem had to do with Kirk's recent changes, but the disklabel
> issue... I'm wary to reboot my machine! What in the hell could be causing
> this? I'm tempted to point the finger at GEOM, but hate to say anything
> like that.

Same here today. I had system from Nov 21, both world and kernel.
Did buildworld, installworld and then rebooted with old 21Nov
kernel. At boot fsck whined about /usr (ad0s1d) partition and died
with incorrect superblock message leaving the system in single user.
The /usr partition has UFS2 filesystem. Why the partition had to be
fsck'ed? The system went down cleanly after build-installworld.
I tried to fsck_ffs -b 32 /usr but it didn't like it either and died
with signal 8. Floating point exception. I know the next alternate
superblock _is_ there at 32, because I converted /usr to UFS2 only
few days ago and remember the newfs command exactly.
After the failed attempt of fsck_ffs -b 32 suddenly some fragment of
recent -current talk popped in my mind and I remember there was talk
about mount command doing some trickery. So I went with
mount -t ufs -f /dev/ad0s1d /usr and voila the data was there.
I'm almost sure that I can reproduce it, because I have the / and
/usr dumps from the time I did UFS2 converting and the live-current
cd burnt for this purpose (JPSNAP). It's possible to go back in time
and fully restore the system as it were before.
-- 

Vallo Kallaste
kalts@estpak.ee

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