*BSD News Article 21936


Return to BSD News archive

Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!csc.ti.com!tilde.csc.ti.com!mksol!pmlss4!bmyers
From: bmyers@asd470.dseg.ti.com (Bob Myers)
Subject: FreeBSD EPSILON -> Bogus Super Block
Message-ID: <1993Oct6.120915.5678@mksol.dseg.ti.com>
Sender: usenet@mksol.dseg.ti.com (Usenet News)
Nntp-Posting-Host: pmlss4.dseg.ti.com
Reply-To: bmyers@asd470.dseg.ti.com
Organization: Texas Instruments
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1993 12:09:15 GMT
Lines: 34

This is my first attempt to use this product; I've been running Linux for the
last few months and thought that I would try this out....

Here's the hardware setup:
  DTK 80486-25/64k cache, Ultrastor 12F with 345mb and 676 mb drives attached (ESDI),
  16550afn-based serial card with Telebit Worldblazer attached, 12 mb ram, 
  Adaptec 1542c with Archive 525e tape subsystem and 320 mb scsi hard drive.

This is what happened:

I'm trying to load FreeBSD onto the first esdi drive (345 mb), that has about
18 bad spots scattered through the disk  (Linux's ext2fs file system handles
this with no problem).  During the setup process, I fed in the parameters
for the hard drive's geometry that Linux's fdisk produces (16 heads, 666 cylinders,
63 sectors/track).  When the system goes to create the ufs file structure,
I start to see messages concerning BOGUS SUPER BLOCK occur.  I suspect that these
are generated when attempting to write to a bad spot area on the disk.

During the 2nd phase of the install, after rebooting and hitting return  to the
'insert filesystem floppy' prompt with the initial adaptec-based boot floppy still
inserted, another problem hits....

When the system starts checking, it finds a problem with block 16 in the /usr
structure...fsck panics, then prints that it's going to do an automatic reboot...
this *DOESN'T* happen; instead, an endless loop starts up and I see the same
messages occuring --- about the bad/corrupted block 16.


Any suggestions???   I don't have the funds to purchase a new hard drive at this 
time...

-bob