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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!fs7.ece.cmu.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!aw2t+ From: "Alex R.N. Wetmore" <aw2t+@andrew.cmu.edu> Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Help with restoring my drive Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1993 23:05:57 -0400 Organization: Sophomore, Math/Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 37 Message-ID: <Mg4f2JW00WB54AlJYb@andrew.cmu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: po5.andrew.cmu.edu I just lost the drive that contains my /usr partition. All of the data is still there, but I killed the disklabel, and possibly the bootblock. Basically, I was trying to make it my primary drive (so that I could boot off of it), and disklabeled and used os-bs to put a boot block on it. At that point os-bs would come up and never bootstrap the partition. So I gave up the project and tried to revert what I did. I used os-bs to restore the original boot-block, and re-disklabeled the disk back to its original state. Now the drive won't fsck (it gives hard errors and says that the super block doesn't agree with the alternate super block). Now here is the trick. My machine's bios has no idea that this second drive exists (it is a new 250 meg wd ide drive, and my bios doesn't have any drives over about 120 megs in the bios drive table). To format the drive I had to put it into my fathers machine (which has a newer AMI bios) and format it with the NetBSD install disks (I wasn't able to get it to format or disklabel properly originally). When I did all of this playing around this morning I did it in my machine (where the CMOS doesn't know about the drive) and I think that might have been when I screwed stuff up. If I do a disklabel now it reports that I have 1010 cylinders (the right amount), but when it marks the cylinder numbers next to partitions they are definatly wrong (the highest cylider there is 59, instead of 1010). I have tried disklabeling it again in my fathers machine with his bios, and have even used the fdisk on NetBSD to make sure that the disk has the cylinders and stuff right. Stupidly I didn't back up my disk before this process (I don't have a tape drive, and don't have any other machines I can backup to at home). At this point there is about 10 megs of rather important stuff that I would like to get off of the disk, but in an ideal world I would like to be able to fix what I have done if that is possible. Does anyone have any ideas? At this point I'm not going to play with it until I hear either that it is hopeless (which I suspect), or some ideas on how to fix it. thanks, alex