Subject: Need help - lost access to my NetBSD partitions
To: None <port-amiga@netbsd.org>
From: Lars Hecking <lhecking@nmrc.ie>
List: port-amiga
Date: 01/30/2002 14:22:48
 A3000 with CS MkIII, Quantum Viking II 4.5GB at SCSI id 8; Kick ROM 3.1
 
 Most of this is probably OT, but I'd appreciate some feedback, even off-list.

 First, there's a bug in rdbinfo and xstreamtodev as distributed with
 NetBSD: they don't find devices with SCSI id's > 7.

 The Quantum is partitioned as follows: 50MB AmigaOS, and altogether
 about 1.5GB of NetBSD / swap /usr /home, rest unused.

 I wanted to prepare another large partition for NetBSD as scratch
 area, and used the AmigaOS scsiconfig tool that came with the CS
 to set it up.

 After that, I couldn't boot NetBSD anymore from the bootblock, it looks
 like scsiconfig has f!cked up the RDB.

 rdbread tells me that the disk doesn't have a vaild RDB. For the
 same reason, it doesn't allow me to write the backup RDB I made
 a few months ago (I'm not yet desperate enough to try the FORCE option).

 Back to NetBSD: I can use loadbsd on the Amiga side, but when I boot
 into NetBSD, it tells me for every partition that

 Partition geometry 9/109 differs from RDB 9/109

 (what's the difference between 9/109 and 9/109?) and also

 Warning: found rdb->secpercyl(980) != rdb->nsectors(109) * rdb->nheads(9)

 Which means I cannot even fsck these partitions from a miniroot (bad
 magic number).

 Back into AmigaOS, I tried to use scsiconfig to read the geometry data from
 disk. It reported that the HD is bigger than 4GB (correct :) and that I need
 a newer version of FFS, and then proceeded with instructions how to create
 a patched FFS version 44.4 from the one on the WB3.1 Install disk.

 I did that and installed the patched FFS, but scsiconfig keeps giving me
 the same errors.

 Important question: how do I get my software to recognise the proper disk
 geometry again? If a low-level format is required, so be it (I have a
 backup of the AmigaOS partition, and no critical data on NetBSD; still,
 losing everything would be a major nuisance). I will also ring DCE and
 try to get an answer there (if any :-/).

 Thanks!