OK, I have a followup question to this.
After some mucking around, I've managed to lose my partition again
(although the data is still there, I installed testdisk and let
photorec run; it looks like it's finding pretty much everything.)
Running newfs -N on /dev/aacd0 finds a ton of backup superblocks.
My filesystems were originally /dev/aacd0s1a, aacd0s1b and aacd0s1e.
When I originally recreated the FreeBSD partition with the same
geometry under my new rescue HDD, it added a device entry "aacd0s1c"
but not any of the others.
Running fsck_ufs -b <any of the listed backup superblocks> doesn't
seem to do much of anything.
I'd be grateful if someone could help me with the following questions:
1) when I run the above command, is it supposed to replace a
filesystem's superblock with the backup superblock?
2) is there a way to look at the contents of the backup superblocks
that newfs -N found?
3) is there a way to re-create aacd0s1a, aacd0s1b and aacd0s1e? The
rescue OS seems to only want to bother with aacd0s1c, which was not
used by any of the partitions previously.
Thanks for any help,
-John
On Jul 21, 2008, at 1:04 PM, John Morgan Salomon wrote:
Wow, a sympathetic ear, was expecting far more scorn than that :-)
I am currently running TestDisk, which at least _appears_ to be
finding something filesystem-like (at least it's listed a few
"empty" "somethings" that look somehow reasonable, size-wise.)
Cross your fingers. Gpart and TestDisk are entirely passive, i.e.
don't touch data on the disks.
My plan, if this works out, is to buy a secondary backup consisting
of a RAID 1+0 NAS. I don't have anything big enough to back up
everything to.
I tried pretty much everything with fsck_ufs. Like I said, though,
I am able to mount the entire partition from the bootable IDE
drive. I see /, /etc/, /dev/ and all that, but since the "rescue"
OS can't see any additional superblocks, it has no devices for the
other filesystems. I am not sufficiently well versed in UFS to
understand how an entire partition can be mounted as a filesystem if
that partition originally had multiple filesystems on it. I'm a bit
wary of playing more with fsck until all else has failed. :-)
What also weirds me out is that FreeBSD constantly bitches about the
partition being larger than the physical disk (which it decidedly
isn't.) I've tried setting geometry in fdisk any which way
(including using the RAID controller's provided values), and as I
said, the thing mounts the root partition of the array just fine.
I'm considering an exorcist.
Best,
-John
On Jul 21, 2008, at 12:52 PM, Polytropon wrote:
Hi!
On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:57:09 +0200 (CEST), "John Morgan Salomon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
Before you ask, this was the backup server. My primary box had
decided to
die shortly before. I had no backup backup server. Murphy strikes.
I completely do understand you, I'm suffering from a similar problem
at the moment, but much worse than yours...
Buy tape drives! Buy tape drives! Buy tape drives! :-)
Can someone recommend a way to manually scan the entire partition
(either
aacd0, aacd0s1 or aacd0s1c) for formerly present filesystems? I
am 99%
sure that all the data is still present, and if I reinstall the
superblocks I'll be able to boot the array, mount the filesystems
and get
the data off before I continue. I don't know whether I've missed
any
gpart options (I have the impression it only scans for lost
partitions,
not ufs filesystem signatures.)
As far as I know - NB that I'm just starting to learn more about UFS,
shame on me that I'll do this just as every piece of data is gone -
there are more than one superblock present. According to "man
fsck_ufs",
this could be a starting point:
-b Use the block specified immediately after the flag as
the super
block for the file system. An alternate super block is
usually
located at block 32 for UFS1, and block 160 for UFS2.
This applies if just the first superblock is gone.
Before you start experimenting, maybe it's a good idea to dd the
data out of the disks and run fsck on the images? I'm not sure...
Any help, tips or pointers would be tremendously appreciated.
Hope you're lucky.
--
Polytropon
From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
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