Subject: root partition hosed
To: NetBSD Mailing List <port-mac68k@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Josh Hope <otaku@unixgeek.ml.org>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 05/09/1998 13:28:21
I came home from work yesterday to find my kernel had dropped into debug 
mode for some *strange* reason. I couldn't figure it out. So I did a 
'cont' in the debugger, and watched it do a kernel dump and restart. 

I rebooted, and ran fsck -p in singleuser (of course) just to make sure 
nothing bad happened. Then I got a SCSI read error (the only thing I can 
remember about it was that it was a 'medium' error) while running fsck. 
It said to re-run it, so I ran it fsck -y. This time, it gave out a lot 
of medium scsi read errors, and started to spit out blocks that were 
unreadable. It said it marked the filesystem as clean, but it said again 
to run fsck yet another time. So, I ran it -p again. Then all heck broke 
loose.

It started at offset 100 or so, and fsck spit out a sleu of errors 
containing the offset number. I left the computer for a while, to wait 
for it to stop. I came back, and it was at the 5 millionth offset, so I 
just restarted.

I booted into Mac OS to see if the partition was accessable from the 
Instaler, but it was giving scsi read errors. Also, I tried Booting 
again, but it was *also* giving scsi read errors. 

Now, I have hardly touched this NetBSD partition in a while. The last 
thing I installed was months ago. I was even *away* when this all 
happened! It's as if the thing just "gave up" after being on continously 
for a year.

What I'm asking for are any suggestions on what happened, or what to do 
to retrieve in the least *some* information from this hosed partition. 
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks a lot,

Josh