To start with, there will not be a snapshot done this weekend....

I currently have my system running on 1.5.2, but it was a tortuous process
getting there.

For the curious, this is what I've done to try to recover:

As you may recall, my system got into a state where statically-linked
programs would run, but dynamically-linked ones didn't.  I'm not sure
it's a kernel problem, as none of the 1.5X kernels that I have access
to, nor the 1.5Y (neither the one built under 1.5X nor the one built
clean under 1.5.2) are able to get past the problem.

The first thing I did was to mount a directory off my Indy which contained
the tarballs from my earlier snapshot.  (I'm kinda regretting my agressive
pruning of old snapshots. ;-)  I was able to restore from the tarballs,
but that didn't fix the problem.  So I decided to set up a second disk and
work from that.

I had a spare 2GB disk laying around, so I plugged that into my machine.
Even though the system was able to see the drive, the drive never came
up ready.  After I pulled it back out and disassembled it, I found out
why.  It had suffered a head crash. :-(

So, I decommisioned my games machine (Q650 w/ PPC and i486 cards) which
I never used any more, and pulled out the 9GB disk (purchased at the
same time as the one in my NetBSD machine).  I partitioned it and did
a mkfs on it, and proceeded to try installing 1.5.2 on it.

"Try" being the operative word here.  It got into /sbin and had a disk
failure.  I went back and repartitioned, adding a MacOS partition at the
end, mkfs'd and tried installing again.  Failed in the same place.  I
installed the etc package, which went well.  Tried base again, and it
failed again, in a different place.  Grrr...

OK, since -current runs, even if crippled, I'll do it from there.  So
I booted, and ran a fsck on the second disk.  WTF?  Superblock doesn't
match first alternate?  I rebooted back to MacOS, did a mkfs on it from
there, back to -current and fsck, still doesn't match.  OK, I'll do a
fsck -O from here.

So, with the fresh fsck from -current, I mounted the directory off the
Indy and proceeded to do the installs.  All went well, except I had no
devices.  Couldn't build them from the crippled -current, so I figured
I could do it from the Installer.  I figured wrong.  The installer
couldn't see the partition, even though I had used -O with mkfs.  Cripes.

So I booted 1.5.2 to see if I could build devices from there, but nope.
Since there was no /dev/sdxx, I couldn't mount / rw to build them. OK.
Where there's a will, there's a way.

I booted back to the crippled -current.  For some reason, it didn't want
to copy the devices from disk to disk, so I did a tar|tar copy, which
worked.  I was then able to boot 1.5.2, fix my fstab, mount / properly
and do a proper MAKEDEV.

So, I have 1.5.2 running on the system, and have just updated my -current
sources.  With any kind of luck, I can get them rebuilt and a system
running again...

I think I saw a posting on one of the lists that told how to get to
-current from 1.5.2.  Does anyone have a pointer to that message?

Frustrated, but persevering,
~Steve



-- 
Steve Allen - wormey@eskimo.com   http://www.eskimo.com/~wormey/   ICQ 6709819

Faith is the quality that enables you to eat blackberry jam on a picnic
without looking to see whether the seeds move.

Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly.  
It just happens to be selective about who it makes friends with.
	-Kyle Hearn  <kyle@intex.net>

If you didn't get caught, did you really do it?