On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>> Well, the fact that I've been installing one set of binaries over another,
>> rather than wiping out the old ones first, makes me somewhat wary.
>> Now that I'm read-write and know rm works, I could do an "rm -rf /" to
>> clear everything out first, yes?  Or is simply formatting again with 
>> Mkfs the suggested method of doing this?  
> 
> What would you do after the rm? You've now deleted ALL the programs which
> could install anything else...

That was with the intent of doing a _total_ wipe, and re-installing from
scratch with the Installer from the MacOS side.  Naturally, I'd rather
not go that far.  =)  But not knowing what to selectively remove versus
what to leave as is, that was about my only option for a "clean" install.
(but see response lower down before jumping on me for saying this...)
 
> If you still have the base.tgz file around, cpin it to NetBSD (assuming
> you have the space) and run cksum, the checksummer, on it. 

Duh!  I can't believe that didn't even occur to me.  Urgh.  Thanks.

> As David mentioned, you might have library problems. If you didn't
> delete /usr/lib (or a directory which houses it...) before re-installing,
> then all the newer broken shared libraries are still there. They will
> have larger version numbers than the ones from a distribution
> (either 1.3, 1.3.1, or 1.3.2), and so will be preferentially used.

Good tip.  You may have saved me a scorched-earth install.

> /etc/fstab can't be used to find the root partition as it can't be
> found until after the root partition's mounted. :-)

I was kinda wondering for the same reason why I was asked about
my /etc/fstab...  =)
 
> If this ext2fs check-w/-failure is happening at the "root on XXXX"
> point AND it's actually figuring out that the partition's an
> ffs partition, DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT! The kernel's just being chatty. 
> If either it doesn't figure out the filesystem on that partition is an
> ffs partition (or the ext2fs code chokes when it actually is an ext2fs
> filesystem) (set accent=NewYork) _then_ you got problems.

Mm hmm.  Well, here's the exact message where it's choking...

  boot device: sd0
  root on sd0a dumps on sd0b
  PRAM: 0x35c6d762, macos_boottime: 0x35c6d756.
  root file system type: ext2fs
  bad directory entry: directory entry across blocks
  offset=0, inode=167772160, rec_len=3072, name_len=256
  panic: ext2fs_dirbadentry
  Stopped at _Debugger+0x6:  unlk  a6

...and debugger prompt, at which all I know to do right now is reboot.
So whattaya think, sirs?

I'll try cleaning up my libraries tonight, to see if that clears up the 
vi problem under the 1.3.2 kernel.  But the above problem when trying 
newer kernels, looks to be kernel-specific since it's not accessing the
the file system correctly, much less the proper libraries or binaries.

Slowly closing in, I think... =)
-jope

--
 J.P. Montagnet
 jope@n2h2.com
 El JoPe Magnifico!