Thanks Kevin,

This is quite helpful, only I have a fairly unusual disk structure, since the disk was originally a dual boot system with windows XP which I eventually converted into a full ufs drive. So all the BSD partitions are located on what was originally the second half of the disk. Is there anyway I can escape out of the automount prompt and run fdisk, or anything. I've been trying everything I can think of.

Thanks,

Dan.

Kevin Kinsey wrote:

Dan Simmonds wrote:

I have a relatively new installation of FreeBSD 5.3 which I have been running
as a file server. Recently we had a power outage and when I booted up the
machine again, instead of a normal boot sequence I was given an "automount" prompt.


I understand that I have to mount a disk slice and fsck my hard drive (I think
this is right, please correct me if I'm wrong), only its been a while since I sliced
up my hard drive and I've forgotten what the disk looks like. Is there anyway
of investigating the disk geometry from this automount prompt? The only
commands I seem to have available are mount commands.


Thanks,

Dan.



(Hi, Dan ... this probably needs to go over to [EMAIL PROTECTED],
where more experience folks will see it, so I'm redirecting the CC there...)


Ouch!  I hope your disk can recover.  Once you get this grassfire
out, be sure and check your backup strategies....

The *only* command you can enter isn't even really a command,
it's simply the answer to the question "where the heck is /boot?"
which is something the system desperately needs to know.

IIRC (and who knows, it has been a little while since I saw this
one, thank Deity) it gives you a hint or two about what to
do.  The usual boot device is /dev/ad0s1 (for IDE drives) or
/dev/da0s1 (for SCSI) and the filesystem type is normally
ufs (but that could vary, ufs2 for example<?>).

Once you get in, you will want to fsck and attempt to
remount your slices; you probably won't have access to a lot
of normal tools (for at least two reasons I can think of:
one being that some of them are on the /usr partition,
and the other being that $PATH is not set, so even stuff
in /bin and /sbin will *say* "not found", just call 'em by the
full path /sbin/fsck, /sbin/mount, etc.)  If everything fscks
clean, try rebooting again to return to multi-user (normal)
mode.

Good luck.

Kevin Kinsey


_______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"

Reply via email to