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