hard error reading: set fstab mounts to frw: can no longer access filesystem

[Edwin D. Vinas]

Hi,

After a power outage my FreeBSD-4.10 server's 40GB HDD had many
fragmentations and no matter how I repeatedly do "fsck", the errors saying
"hard error reading fsbn" are still there. I tried doing fsck over and over
but it seems this is already a hardware error and can no longer be
corrected. So my goal now is to recover my files!

First, I did a "mount -a" and was able to copy some of important files but I
have more data which I need to backup which I thought would only be possible
if I can make the server boot and make it work at least with TCP/IP so I can
transfer data to the other PCs in the LAN. But, after "mount -a", I edited
the fstab to set mounts to "frw" to force mount all drives and not give me
those "hard error reading fsbn". So, I rebooted the machine, only to find
out that after it mounted all partitions the the "/usr/libexec/getty"
something can't be found or executed for ttys and its giving me unending
errors. And there it goes, I can no longer access my filesystem because it
hangs or doesn't have a terminal when the machine is about to finish
booting. There is no prompt anymore, all I can see are the getty errors. If
only I can edit fstab back without "f" option, I can still manually copy my
files to a USB.

Is there anyway to still recover my files? Is there a way  I can edit fstab
to remove "f" option so I can't have those getty errors? Or is it possible
to mount the server's HDD in another FreeBSD machine?


Thanks.
Ed