How to recover data? - Formatted, Fdisk'd, and disklabeled ad1, now ad0 with FreeBSD is messed up

[Mark Kane]

Ruben Bloemgarten wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> On disk ad1 you have one slice ad1s1 which has one partition ad1s1d, 
> mount this 
> # mount /dev/ad1s1d /mnt 
> Now check the size of the partition :

Hi Ruben. Thanks for the response.

After mounting /dev/ad1s1d in FixIt, df -h shows:

/dev/ad1s1d with 55G Size, and 51G Avail. That looks right for a 60GB 
drive.

> If the size of this partition is equal to the size of your drive you just
> used the entire drive for that one partition. If it's not you did not finish
> labeling the remainder of the slice

That's what I wanted it to do, use the entire drive in one partition.

> I'm assuming that FBSD is installed on your other disk ad0 where you have
> one slice ad0s1 and 5 partitions a,b,d,e,f, which I assume are /, swap, var,
> usr and home respectively.

Yes, FreeBSD was installed on ad0 with the 5 partitions as you said.

> Now, for a total picture, I hope, it seems that you installed FBSD on ad0s1*
> and newfs'd/disklabel ad1s1* hoping to later mount this and get y'r data on
> there. If FBSD is not booting I assume you did not install any type of boot
> manager.
> 
> The big mystery to me here is this : you say you 
>  
> 1. you backed up the content of you 60 GB NTFS drive to your 160GB drive
> (which I therefore assume to be ad0)
> 2. installed FBSD on you 160GB drive (still ad0)
> 3. newfs'd your 60GB drive ( ad1)

Yes, I installed FBSD on ad0s1* on Thursday of last week. I copied the 
data from the 60GB drive on ad1 to the 160GB drive Saturday night (from 
within FreeBSD).

Sunday morning, I newfs'd my 60GB drive (ad1), and after doing so, 
FreeBSD (on drive ad0) wouldn't boot anymore. I didn't touch anything on 
ad0.

So to clear it up, I did NOT copy my data to the 160GB drive, then 
install FreeBSD, then format my 60GB drive (I see what you mean about 
where would my data be).

I copied the data from 60GB to 160GB with FreeBSD installed, and then 
ONLY newfs'd the 60GB (ad1). Somehow after doing that, FreeBSD won't 
boot and I'm not sure what happened.

Thanks again.

-Mark