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.
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. 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 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
