Re: root file system type: msdos

[Scrap Happy <Scrap%GMX.com@localhost>]

Hi Andy,

[copy to the list, just to add clarification]

On 5/23/2011 12:54 PM, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Scrap Happy<Scrap%gmx.com@localhost>  wrote:
> > Boot ran as expected *until* "root filesystem type: msdos" (!)
> > Thereafter, it hung.  Being too tired to troubleshoot it, I
> > opted, instead, to crash.
>
> What exactly does "Boot ran as expected *until* "root filesystem type:
> msdos" mean? I think this means that the kernel booted but it's trying
> to mount root as msdos?

It means the BIOS found the active partition and passed control
to the NetBSD first stage loader.  The loader pulled in the
NetBSD kernel (from the wd0a slice).  The kernel appears to have
found all of the devices in the system.  *And*, hung after
emitting "root file system type: msdos".

> If that's the case, I guess it has to be getting that from somewhere
> so it seems like you fat fingered fdisk or disklabel somehow? Or maybe
> it could be related to fstab but I don't know how it would get msdos
> from an fstab problem.

The boot sector of the "bad" disk agrees, byte for byte, with that
of the "good" disk -- with the exception of the partition table
entry used by NetBSD (because it's a different size disk).  The
numbers in that entry *seem* to be correct and correspond with
the values that fdisk reports for that drive.  A single exception
occurs at offset 0x191 -- which I suspect is a timeout value change (?)

When I boot the *original* (good) disk (as wd0), I can mount
all of the new disk's file systems as:
mount /dev/rwd1[aefgh] /mnt/<whatever>

The filesystems mounted report themselves to be of type "ffs".

I.e., the MBR is identical to the MBR on this (good) drive
(with the exceptions above).  And, the filesystems (including
their contents) appear to be correct and intact (suggesting
the disklabel is correct).

> Using an install cd or floppy is nice to look at these types of
> problems. Try actually mounting all of the filesystems using the
> install cd and see what happens.

As I said, I mount them using the original 3.1 system (that
was installed on the machine) with no problems.

(Note that the kernel I am booting is a copy of the kernel
from that "good" disk)