Hi everyone :)

[Peter Jeremy]

On Tue, 2004-Dec-14 15:14:32 -0800, J D wrote:
>Hey, new here.  I figured I would subscribe to this list as opposed to
>the others because I have something of an odd problem which is directly
>related to matters hardware.

Alpha hardware is sufficiently uncommon that it's also discussed on -alpha.

>Recently, that machine simply stopped working.  You hit the power
>switch, hear a brief click and spinning up of fans, and the power light
>goes off about a second and a half afterward, sans any beeping,
>blinking lights or presentation of error information on the machine's
>built-in LCD.

That sounds like a PSU problem.  I agree that trying to buy a new one
would be impractical (and uneconomic).  If you know someone with some
hardware skills, it may be repairable - the inside probably won't be
that peculiar.

>The machine now recognizes the presence of the three 2GB drives, but
>sysinstall's fdisk calls the partitions on them "unused."  When I do
>"fdisk da0" from a root prompt, however, I get these bits of relevant
>data:

The problem is that Alpha disks don't have a PC-style partition table.

>So.  Be straight with me.  Is the data on these drives completely
>unrecoverable?  Can I do some gymnastics to get it back?

The data is still there and should be recoverable.  Rather than
using sysinstall, try installing the disks onto a functional FreeBSD
system and try "disklabel daN".  You should be able to mount those
partitions.

>issue.  Is there some help for this, if true?  Wikipedia says this
>about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness which makes me think
>that possibly my Alpha and PII are different-endian.

The Alpha is theoretically bytesexual but, AFAIK, only little-endian
Alpha systems exist.  Your A1000 is definitely little-endian - which
matches your P-II.  The only issue you might bump into is that longs
are 32-bits on i386 and 64-bits on Alpha, though all the on-disk
structures are fixed sizes so this won't affect mounting the disk.

>TIA for any help you can offer.  Anyone who wants it, btw, can have any
>of the hardware from my Alpha machine if they'd like it :)

You might like to offer this in -alpha and give an indication of where
you are (since an A1000 is not compact).

-- 
Peter Jeremy