Re: Need help - lost access to my NetBSD partitions

[Gunther Nikl <gni%gecko.de@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 02:22:48PM +0000, Lars Hecking wrote:
> 
>  A3000 with CS MkIII, Quantum Viking II 4.5GB at SCSI id 8; Kick ROM 3.1
                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^
  Stupid question (I am not a SCSI expert): Is this a wide harddisk?

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

  Sorry, same as before I am not an expert here. However, it seems strange
  that both programs refuse to work. Maybe they have a hardcoded unit
  check.

>  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.

  I guess using "scsiconfig" was the mistake. Which program did you use
  initially to partition the disk?

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

  This seems to indicate that you used a different tool to setup the disk
  in the first place...

>  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).

  Can't you use HDToolBox to restore the RDB? I guess using the FORCE
  option of rdbread won't do any harm. You will only loose your new
  scratch partition. Hopefully, you haven't written anything to disk
  after you played with "scsiconfig".

>  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.

  You do only need this if you want to use FFS on a partition beyound or
  crossing the 4GB limit.

>  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

  The problem is that SCSIConfig has a different opinion than other tools
  used to partition a disk. I think if you create partitions with SCSIConfig
  and then format these with the AmigaOS format command, everything will
  work under AmigaOS. You will quite likely still have problems with NetBSD.
  However, I always thought that the warnings from the NetBSD amigaos FFS
  code are harmless...

>  I will also ring DCE and try to get an answer there (if any :-/).

  Thats not necessary.

  Gunther