Hi everyone :)

[Shane Ambler]

Something you haven't made clear - is the scsi card the same one from the
alpha machine?

Raid disks from one controller rarely read from another controller.


On 15/12/2004 9:44, "J D" <starkruzr1701 at yahoo.com> 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.
> 
> Until about a month ago I was running FreeBSD on a DEC AlphaServer
> 1000, which is an old, relatively inexpensive server system based, of
> course, on Digital's Alpha architecture.
> 
> 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.
> 
> In my experience, problems like these are usually caused by power
> supplies, which in this machine's case is dazzlingly proprietary with
> all kinds of connectors and such coming out of it that I don't
> recognize.  Realizing that tracking down spare parts for this machine
> was going to be extremely difficult, I decided to try the following:
> 
> 1) Pull the drives out of the machine and remove them from their
> cartridge casings
> 2) Hook them together to an Adaptec 2940 SCSI card
> 3) Put that into my old PII/400 system
> 4) Install BSD and hope that somehow I'd be able to mount the disks as
> different partitions, get the data out, dump it somewhere safe, and
> then start over fresh with my new IDE/SCSI Frankenstein machine.
> 
> Naturally, it's step 4 I'm having trouble with.
> 
> 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:
> 
> fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found
> Media sector size is 512
> Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
> The data for partition 1 is:
> sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
>   start 63, size 4096512 (2000 Meg), flag 80 (active)
>       beg: cyl 0/ head1/ sector 1;
>       end: cyl 254/ head 254/ sector 63
> The data for partition 2 is:
> <UNUSED>
> 
> And so on for 3 and 4.
> 
> I get the same results for da1 and da2 (including flag 80 (active),
> which is somewhat puzzling to me).
> 
> So.  Be straight with me.  Is the data on these drives completely
> unrecoverable?  Can I do some gymnastics to get it back?  I was afraid
> in the beginning of this little project that I might have an endianness
> 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.  Can I do anything
> about the data that's still on these drives if that's the case?
> 
> 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 :)
> 
> JD
> 
> 
> 
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-- 

Shane Ambler
Sales Department
007Marketing.com
Shane at 007Marketing.com