[H-GEN] FreeBSD Bad Superblock

[Greg Black]

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On 2003-06-01, Three Blokes wrote:
> It suggested I run fsck manually, when doing this I found fsck recognised
> the bad superblock and used the Alternate Superblock to check the partition,
> but DIDNT FIX THE SUPERBLOCK, a search of google didn't turn up any clues,
> so I formatted and started the whole process again.

Just to confirm: did the fsck complete successfully using the
alternate super block?

If the answer was "yes", then there was no point in starting
over again.

> I changed my config file, recompiled my kernel source
> and installed it, upon reboot my heart sank to the bottom of my stomach -
> Bad Superblock on /dev/ad2sla1.

Sounds as though your drive is on the way to heaven (and should
be sent there as soon as you can manage that).

> Now to my point: I assume this is due to this poor excuse of a harddrive I
> was given flaking out on me and wiping the superblock which I assume I will
> never be able to rectify, i'm only using this HDD as a test platform and
> will move BSD on to a proper drive when i'm happy that it does everything I
> need but for now is there some way I can make the kernel use the alternate
> superblock and mount the bloody partition anyway, at the moment when fsck
> detects the fault rc terminates and my root partition(and the rest of the
> system) doesnt get mounted/booted.

The normal thing to do here is to run fsck -b xxx (where xxx,
the alternate super block, is usually 32); then exit from the
single user shell and watch the boot complete.

Then, provided you do a clean shutdown, the file systems will
all be marked clean and the system won't want to run fsck
again.  Of course, if you do need to run fsck again, either
because you chose to or because you had an unclean shutdown,
you'll just have to repeat this process.  It's a pain, but it's
simple enough.

However, if you have this bad block, you either have or will
soon have plenty of others -- disks are dirt cheap, so just buy
a new one and save yourself the grief.

And, to answer your other question, plenty of people here do run
BSD systems.

Greg

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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