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Date:      Thu, 24 Oct 2002 11:40:43 -0500
From:      Matthew Reimer <mreimer@vpop.net>
To:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: fsck lasting several hours (and then forever) after crash
Message-ID:  <3DB8228B.90203@vpop.net>
In-Reply-To: <lists.freebsd.stable.20021024152331.GA43887@xor.obsecurity.org>
References:  <lists.freebsd.stable.20021024152331.GA43887@xor.obsecurity.org> <lists.freebsd.stable.20021024161227.GA248@Deadcell.ant>

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Andreas Ntaflos wrote:

> Is there anything else I could do to help solving this problem?
> regards

We had a problem like this when an ATA disk went bad--the kernel would 
seem to hang while trying to read the bad part of the disk. Try booting 
into single-user mode (boot -s) and then try reading all the disk's 
blocks. If it hangs doing this, then you know it's not fsck's fault:

     dd if=/dev/ad0s1c of=/dev/null bs=64k

It turned out that our disk just needed a low-level format. Apparently, 
writing zeroes to (some) disks effects a low-level format, so I zeroed 
the entire bad disk (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s1c) and then I could 
read all the disks's blocks without problems. Of course zeroing the disk 
will destroy all your data. If you knew which blocks were bad you could 
try zeroing just those blocks; if they weren't holding real important 
information (like a superblock) then you might be able to save your files.

Matt


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