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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!uunet!in3.uu.net!129.115.10.31!naiad.utsa.edu!uthscsa.edu!nnrp1.crl.com!not-for-mail From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Good GOD, I'm ****ed! Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 00:25:00 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 60 Message-ID: <3365A24C.237C228A@FreeBSD.org> References: <01bc53e7$d0302c20$e5180ed0@default> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) To: Immortal <webmaster@global-impact.com> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:40075 Immortal wrote: > After booting into the FreeBSD 2.2.1 on (d2), 3 time, its MBR migrated over > to our (d1) rendering our (d1) useless! Yes, MIRGRATE is the proper word! No, "impossible" is the proper word. :-) Something may have happened to this drive, but "MBR migration" is not one of those things - MBRs, to quote Monty Python, do not migrate. Perhaps Windows 95 has some sort of "auto MBR migration" feature in which it explicitly copies such date over without asking you, but I seriously doubt it. Even the boys in Redmond rarely screw the pooch with that much enthusiasm. In any case, short of this or cosmic intervention (in which case you're ****ed anyway since you will, no doubt, soon meet with a bizarre and fatal accident ["Craziest thing I ever saw! A cow, falling out of nowhere, smashed this poor man flat as he was crossing the street!"]) there's simply no way for this hypothesis to be true. > We tring FDISK /MBR using a WIN95 / WINNT4 / DOS 4 / etc boot disk to try > to get back into our (d1) IDE drive but everything FAILED! That definitely points to another problem then. ``FDISK /MBR'' *will* nuke the MBR back to a non-bootmanager state, I know as I've used it for this purpose many times and the only time it failed is when the drive was phyically damaged. :-) > DRIVE NOT READY > > And other drive ERROR messages. Sounds like you simply lost a drive to me, fella. They *do* do that occasionally, you know. We probably lose around 3 a year around here, on average. > After 4 days of trying to get into (d1), the primary IDE drive, and > failing, we sent the drive away and spent over $1,300 dollars on DATA > RECOVERY! Sounds like you did exactly what you needed to do (and may need to do again if another drive dies on you and you're fortunate enough to have the failure be non-pathological enough to recover this way). > ...auto-migrating MBR [glitch / virus / one-time problem / ????] you pick > it and beware! This amounts to spreading misinformation, I hate to say. I have been doing this for almost 4 years now and I have *NEVER* seen a single instance of an MBR deciding that it's cold and it's time to migrate south. Never, not one single time. What I have seen at least *several dozen times*, however, is drive failures inducing all manner of bizarre errors. These were hardware failures, they came with no warning whatsoever and, yes, it was occasionally the boot blocks that got toasted first. Sometimes the damage isn't even obvious since drive electronics can go too, not just the physical media or head transport mechanisms. -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.