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From: nowhere@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Chael Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: 386BSD fs screwed up
Message-ID: <4968@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
Date: 2 Sep 93 21:10:27 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: Dept. of CS Ball State University Muncie IN
Lines: 39
I did a really stupid thing today... In an attempt at getting my swap
partition to work correctly, I was messing with disklabel. After many
unsuccessful attempts, I typed something to the effect of:
disklabel -w /dev/rwd0b myswap swapdrive
In my disktab, I made myswap a modified copy of Maxtor 4370 or whatever
that Maxtor drive is in there, since it best matches my system. What I
changed on there was to delete partition a (pa) and to make partition b (pb)
1000 sectors long. Oh, and the number of sectors per track was set to 38 and
tracks/cylinder to 16.
Very soon, I realized that just about all of my files were screwed up
and I no longer had a valid boot sector. I couldn't reboot, fsck, mount,
shutdown or anything. So I logged out all of my processes and rebooted the
machine with the fixit floppy in the drive. It won't read the system because
it says it has a bad sector map error or something like that. The data that
is on the hard drive of my machine is of the utmost importance. As you
probably saw, I didn't know how to format floppies correctly until just a few
days ago, so I don't have much of anything backed up. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE,
if you can help me at all, it would be greatly appreciated. I can get my
computer to come up under MS-DOS and on the fixit and distribution floppies,
but nothing will access that partition of the drive. If I can somehow restore
a boot sector and superblock to the drive, it may help. As I recall, the
drive is partition to be 40 MB MS-DOS and the remaining (of 213 MB) 386BSD.
There was a 10 MB swap partition that I don't think ever worked. It didn't
start in the right place (there was an asterisk next to it under disklabel).
The drive is a Maxtor 7312 AT according to 386BSD, I believe.
If you could tell me where the copies of the super block would have been
stored, maybe it will help, but I think the boot sector needs to be restored
as well.
Thanks greatly in advance,
Chael Hall
nowhere@bsu-cs.bsu.edu, 00CCHALL@bsuvc.bsu.edu