Subject: NetBSD File Corruption
To: None <port-mac68k@netbsd.org>
From: William Duke <wduke@cogeco.ca>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 06/12/2006 12:23:58
I spent the better part of last night and early morning installing
NetBSD 3.0 on a Quadra 700.   This effort took some doing with the
sysinst utility.

I used the instructions from the install doc at ftp.netbsd.org to work
around the drive partitioning and formating bugs in the sysinst utility
-- {control z} to put sysinst in the background, {newfs /dev/rsd0a} and
{mount /dev/sd0a /targetroot}, etcetera.  And that worked wonderfully.

Although, when the install completed and I rebooted the Quadra, I had
some difficulty mounting sd0a for read/write.  The typical {/sbin/mount
-u -w /} wouldn't work, and I had to actually specify {/dev/sd0a} in the
mount command.   The real bugger though, was that I had to manually edit
the fstab file.   For some reason, the line that mounts sd0a in the
fstab file was commented out.   Does anybody know why that is?   And is
that typical?  I've never encountered this before.

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Now, to get to the subject of this message:  file corruption.

I read in the install notes at ftp.netbsd.org that there seems to be a
bug in the Mac 68k distribution of 3.0 that could potentially cause
corruption of the file system.  It is noted that this bug will affect
few users.  Although, there is not much detail provided about the bug
and when and how it manifests itself.   So how would I know if I'm going
to be one of the lucky few that experiences this file corruption?

Also, I'm wondering if this bug is limited to local SCSI devices, or if
it has also been known to corrupt NFS filesystems?  I would think it a
poor idea to share a server's filesystem with a machine that could
potentially corrupt the shared data.  Can someone enlighten me on this?