Subject: Major Drive Problems
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Josh Hope <otaku@unixborg.net>
List: port-i386
Date: 06/04/1999 00:17:23
I am mailing this from my "backup" computer. It appears that my entire 
/usr drive went ka-boom today. I got home to find the X screen blank, as 
it usually is, but I couldn't clear it. Hitting keys on my keyboard did 
nothing, and moving the mouse as well did nothing. The hard drive light 
was on, so I figured it was screwing up again and I hit the reset switch.

I have had two occurences when my swap partition gets messed up, and the 
entire system freezes giving me errors about write errors to the swap 
partition. This is what I thought was happening when I reset, but there 
was no way to be sure. Upon starting up, the automatic file system checks 
failed on my /usr drive (which isn't even the same drive where swap is!)

I've started experiencing these problems since upgrading to NetBSD 1.4. 
They appear to be pretty major ones that should probably be addressed.

My swap partition is on a Maxtor 500MB drive, while the /usr partition is 
on a Western Digital 1GB drive. The root partition resides with swap on 
the Maxtor (and the root partition passed the file system checks on 
startup).

Right now, I'm running fsck -y from singleuser and it's spitting out a 
seemingly endless stream of "wd1g: aborted command reading fsbn <insert 
number here> (wd1 bn <insert another number here>; cn 192 tn 13 sn 
<insert yet another number here>), retrying. Then it goes onto the next 
block to spit out another string, after reporting the previous block as 
unreadable. I also saw an error about not finding any superblocks on the 
drive...

I was hoping someone knew *what* was going on here, maybe. I'm pretty 
sure the partition's hosed and the only thing left for me to do is start 
over. But I would really like to know, before I go jaunting off to start 
everything over again, what *may have* gone wrong so I can make sure it 
does *not* screw up next time. Also, if this does end up being some weird 
type of problem with NetBSD 1.4, it may be worth knowing this :)

I thank you all for your time and help with this matter.


--
Josh Hope
"Sluggishly meandering via a temporary Mac OS server."
-------------------------------------------------------
root@unixborg.net