Note1: my consoles (alt-F[1-8]) are currently black. By black, I mean they
show nothing. The monitor shows no picture and after a few seconds it will
go into power saving mode. Oddly, when in power saving mode, it doesn't give
the normal on-off-on-off with the light that it steadily does. It's more of
a tired person catching their head as soon as they start to fall. It is on,
goes off and immediately comes back on for the normal time, goes off and
quickly catches it, etc.
Note2: The USB hard drive is fat32, connected via USB1.1 host. Note that I
said my _hard drive_ is fat32. I went into fdisk with every intent of
creating a partition to format and saw a fourth partition. I deleted that,
created a first, exited fdisk. Upon lsing /dev, I saw no partitions at all
for the drive -- partition 4 was gone, 1 was nowhere to be found. Someone
told me to use /dev/da0. So I did. This drive doesn't work on windows boxes,
btw -- they say it's unallocated space.
Note3:
[~]# mount /dev/da0 /mnt/USB
mount: /dev/da0 on /mnt/USB: incorrect super block
Hmm. Musta fergotten to umount before ripping out the cable again:
[~]# fdisk -s /dev/da0
/dev/da0: 7296 cyl 255 hd 63 sec
PartStartSize Type Flags
[~]#
umass0: Myson Century, Inc. USB Mass Storage Device, rev 2.00/a0.01, addr 2
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: HITACHI_ DK23FB-60 00M0 Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
da0: 57231MB (117210240 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 7296C)
/dev contains only da0. No da0xx. The umass is also gone, it seems.
kernel conf (seems ktrace is commented out; most likely no debug support):
http://w3.uwyo.edu/~ablair/DrkAthlon.conf
FreeBSD DrkAthlon 5.1-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE-p10 #0: Mon Oct 20
20:30:08 MDT 2003
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/home/obj/usr/home/src/sys/DrkAthlon i386
I believe the world was built at the same time.
[~]$ XFree86 -version
XFree86 Version 4.3.0
Build Operating System: FreeBSD 5.1 i386 [ELF]
Build Date: 18 June 2003
Story:
Woot. New 60 gb USB drive, using a notebook hard drive. Portable, smallest
notebook drive I have that fits, good external storage for this poor BSD box
with about 3 gigs total on it. Course, I often rip out the USB cable of the
poor fat32 drive without umounting it. I try one day:
[~]# mount /dev/da0 /mnt/USB
mount: /dev/da0 on /mnt/USB: incorrect super block
Oh, no, I think. I need to run fsck now. So I proceed to do so:
[~]# fsck /dev/da0
** /dev/da0
** Phase 1 - Read and Compare FATs
*drive read and write lights light up, stay as such for about 1 minute, at
which time the hard drive in the BSD box starts crunching away, lagging
everything*
top, a few tens of seconds in: Swap: 384M total, 281M used, 103M free, 73%
in use...
*drive resumes reading/writing, top reports swap usage as 107M Free. The BSD
box resumes crunching on the internal hard drive, I go, Oh shit --
Mozilla's the first thing to go! I quickly control-C fsck, it having no
effect. It keeps going. In a mad rush, I copy this e-mail to vi before I
lose it. Only lost notes 1 to half of 3.*
So, to recap, and after fsck died and took my mozilla with it:
[~]# fsck /dev/da0
** /dev/da0
** Phase 1 - Read and Compare FATs
fsck: /dev/da0: Killed
dmesg:
swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
pid 81209 (fsck_msdosfs), uid 0, was killed: out of swap space
fsck ran out of swap space and killed mozilla along with it.
Now, that's the basis of what happened when I lost my consoles -- I couldn't
get the drive to mount after I fsck'd, so what else to do but try it again?
I do, and it killed X completely. Damn. Restart x, try mount, no go... so, I
start fsck in a terminal (ctrl-alt-F3). It goes and goes, eventually it
dies. Terminals still work, I believe, so I try it again, alt-F9 back into
my X to play.. fsck fails with the usual great system lag and the death of
X. But I'm thrown to a black console, not a text prompt with an error from X
saying what went wrong. Alt-F[1-8], all black. Monitor turns off. Damn.
Alt-F2 one more time, startx and here I am for the last week or so. I can
use X just fine, but all my consoles are black.
Anyone know why this happened? Does anyone have a way to get my consoles
back? rebooting isn't fun. But, I'm perfectly willing to help debug
something -- it's a personal desktop machine, so I can easily tolerate
downtime and spend a bit of time working with things, if any debugging
suggestions are given (note, I have no idea how to use any debugging utils,
so you'd have to give me very specific directions).
With that, this is perhaps the third or fourth time I've lost all my
terminals in such a way. I've never experienced this on 4.7, and I don't
remember if all times were related to this fsck and taking gobs of swap
space. Also keep in mind my dmesg is full of swap_pager_getswapspace:
failed, so I can't see if anything was given when the error happened.
Finally, for those who don't know, the proper
