Thank you so much Erling! With your help, I was able to comment out my existing volumes with the "ed" editor (thanks for showing me that, what a strange editor), and rescue everything with rsync from my OS drive (mostly /etc and /root), then do a fresh install of 6.3 (with my raid drives unplugged as Stuart Henderson suggested), and my softraid volumes are now back online. I opted to do the fresh install because I already know how to upgrade, and don't have the time for that process. My machine was a 5.0 originally, and I had upgraded it to 5.4 over the years, but when I got married, somehow I lost time for regular upgrades, and instead have only been doing the errata patches. I learned an important lesson when booting with a "Live USB" drive, I never would have thought it would touch my local system, but I guess when I think about it it makes sense. Now the only issue is that my Samba shares are not all working, it seems there is a big difference in Samba 4 from 3, regarding the use of guest accounts. I'll figure it out soon. I really appreciate all the replies though, I probably couldn't have restored my system without everyone's help! Thanks again.
On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 12:09 PM, Erling Westenvik < erling.westen...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 03, 2018 at 10:51:12AM -0500, Brandon Tanner wrote: > > I haven't posted here in years, and OpenBSD has been rock solid for a > home > > file server. However recently I somehow made the machine un-bootable and > > I'm kicking myself for it now. I've tried to google my heart out to fix > > this issue, but I doubt it is very common based on my searches. > > Don't panic. > > > My machine is OpenBSD 5.4, and has 2 x raid1 softraid with 4 disks, and a > > 5th disc for the OS only. > > > > So I was wanting to try out the latest kernel to see if sysctl hw.sensors > > would report my motherboard fan sensors since 5.4 does not, so I made a > > bootable USB live-stick using 6.3, based on this article ( > > http://astro-gr.org/openbsd-live-usb-stick/) which says to prepare the > > machine in QEMU and then dd it to a usb flash drive. I was able to boot > the > > USB stick fine, and run sysctl, and nope, my fan sensors are not there in > > 6.3 either. > > > > Now, when I removed the stick and booted the old system (5.4), it now > won't > > boot. The complaint is that my softraid volumes have a metadata version > > that is newer than it should be. I guess the live-USB stick actually > > upgraded them somehow. > > Quoting https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade60.html: > > "softraid(4) metadata version changed. The current softraid metadata > version has been incremented as part of implementing support for sector > sizes other than 512 bytes. Since on-disk metadata is automatically > updated every time a softraid volume is mounted, once you mount a > softraid volume on a new kernel (including bsd.rd) that volume will no > longer be recognized by older kernels." > > As I see it, you have two options: > > 1. Upgrade your system to at least 6.0, carefully upgrading version by > version and following the steps for each upgrade guide: > > 5.4 -> 5.5 > 5.5 -> 5.6 > 5.6 -> 5.7 > 5.7 -> 5.8 > 5.8 -> 5.9 > 5.9 -> 6.0 > 6.0 -> 6.1 > 6.1 -> 6.2 > 6.2 -> 6.3 > > 2. Do a fresh install of 6.3. > > I would go for option 1. It takes time but you'll learn a lot during the > process, and in the end it may take you just as long to fine tune a > fresh install. > > > The error is basically: > > softraid0: cannot read metadata version 6 on sd1a, expected version 5 or > > earlier > > > > Full Pictures of it are here: > > https://imgur.com/a/jYhVwra > > Which tells us that your OS disk is probably just fine. If you comment > out the raid volumes from /etc/fstab, you won't get any complaints, > right? > > > It looks like this person has a similar experience: > > http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/softraid-not- > bootable-in-5-4-after-visiting-5-5-td253121.html#a253330 > > > > At this point I'm not sure what to do, and I'm afraid to guess at options > > for fear of losing my data. My gut feeling is that I can probably fix > this > > or put a new O/S drive in and install 6.3 on it fresh, and somehow get my > > softraid volumes back up on it. But I wanted to run that theory by you > all > > first. > > > > Thanks, > > Brandon > > Good luck. > > Regards, > > Erling >
