36 Hours ago I received a kernel panic in the middle of the night. This
occurred on a Quadra 700 running NetBSD 1.5.2 that has been running
relatively reliably for the last year and a half. Now I can no longer boot
the machine. I am trying to figure out what my options are at this point.
The message I get when it drops into the debugger is:

root file system type: ffs
panic: ffs_read: type 0
stopped in sh at       _cpu_Debugger+0x6:      unlk      a6
db>

When I do a trace, I get messages involving ffs_read, vn_read, dofileread,
sys_read, syscall, and trap0. I don't have anyway currently to copy and past
the trace messages which is why I'm not reporting all the trace info. If
there's more there that will help decipher what is going on, let me know and
I'll gladly type it all into a message and send it out.

The machine boots into the MacOS just fine. I then run the booter which
seems to go along fine until it hits the above section. I can use mini shell
in the installer to look at the drive and everything there seems fine. I
even tried reloading the kernel.tgz and base.tgz to see if that would
replace some corrupt files. But that didn't make any difference.

I have 4 partitions setup on the 9GB harddrive currently installed in the
Quadra.
1 is a HFS partition for the MacOS to boot from.
2 is a root & usr partition.
3 is a swap partition.
4 is a usr partition which contains most of the data I really would like to
recover.

I would GREATLY appreciate any assistance in getting this machine to boot
again. Or, at the very least, a way to get the information from the usr
partition off the drive.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!!

Brian Heath