Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 19:13:06 -0500 From: "Drew Derbyshire" <ahd@kew.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: file systems eaten by space DOS, film at 11? Message-ID: <32729b0a.kendra@pandora.kew.com>
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*** Please copy to me directly, since my subscription to the list is
still being processed. Sorry ***
This is starting to get annoying.
Personally, I'm a generic multi-platform jockey, 15 years MVS, 10 years
PCs and UNIX (SunOS, AIX, and Solaris), a little OS and admin experience
along the way. Decent, not great, admin, mostly I'm a TCP/IP
C++ applications hacker.
I did my first FreeBSD 2.1.5 installation on a Gateway 386DX/25 with 8M,
ISA bus only, 80M and 1600M WD IDE hard drives. Small drive (wd0) is ~
30M dos fat, ~ 32M root file system, 16M swap, a little left over for a
possible additional primary disk partition (disk slice) for later
addition of a non-FreeBsd boot manager. Large disk (wd1) has large
/var, /usr, and /u (home) partitions, plus another 40M swap. (Yea, I
know I'll thrash like a grain combine first if I need it). System also
has AHA-1542CF, NEC CDR-74, and SMC Elite Ultra, and usual assortment of
parallel/serial ports.
First time I installed FreeBSD, the system ran for about a week, then I
booted to DOS, rewrote the MBR on wd0 to lose the FreeBSD boot manager
(I don't need it, I just set the active partition and run w/o a keyboard
or monitor, use the serial console to serial port on OS/2 server).
However, as I reboot to FreeBSD * B L A M M O * kernel panics because it
can't mount root.
<expletive deleted>, I figure I must have torched non-DOS partition/disk
slice information, although after FreeBSD decides my wd0 disk geometry
has changed to utterly bogus numbers and it forgets wd1's disk slices as
well, I'm starting to wonder. To recover it, I end up using WD's
wdclear to nuke the entire wd0 disk including cylinder 0 to hex 00, and
then I lay down new DOS and freeBSD partition. (This is when I discover
wd1 has forgotton its disk slices, and I nuke its cylinder 0 as well.)
I reinstall, regen kernel from scratch (faster than figuring out how
restore from the ZIP drive dump I took of root, especially since the
drive is disconnected), system works great through 4 days. However, I
have serial port COM3 hiding from me, since I must have IRQ wrong, so I
botto back to DOS via floppy. I don't screw with fdisk, I do access the
C: partition and copy a few programs on it, but nothing special with
partition table.) I determine the proper IRQ with DOS kermit, then
reboot from hard drive into FreeBSD again, same kernel I'd booted
previously ...
... and * B L A M M O * kernel panics because it can't mount root.
I'm willing to dedicate all of wd0 to FreeBSD, but if I lose root again,
I'm _not_ going to be happy. Where the hell is root going? (I can look
on the disk with Norton or whatever, if you can tell where to check.)
Have I got space aliens loose or what? DOS virus is unlikely, since the
DOS install was from fresh write protected MS (tm) disks.
--
Internet: ahd@kew.com Voice: 617-279-9810
Expect the unexpected-- HE does.
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