Trying to recover data from FreeBSD 4.11 system

[Joe Demeny]

On Thursday 14 February 2008 03:46:14 pm Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> Joe Demeny wrote:
> > On Thursday 14 February 2008 12:04:11 pm you wrote:
> >> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 01:08:35AM -0500, Joe Demeny wrote:
> >> [...]
> >>
> >> Use fdisk to find out how it sees the drive.  Do     fdisk ad1
> >> and check out what it says.   Especially look to see what slices
> >> that fdisk thinks it has.   Maybe there is only an  s1  active
> >> with anything in it.  That would be easiest and very common.
> >>
> >> Then use bsdlabel to look at what partitions are defined in any
> >> of the slices.     do ad1s1  (for slice 1,  ad1d2  as well
> >> if there is a slice 2 being used, etc)
> >> From root, do  bsdlabel ad1d1     and see what partitions are defines.
> >> Remember that partition 'c' is not a real partition, but a label to
> >> define the whole slice to the system (it will have a type of 'unused')
> >> and that in most cases partition 'b' is used for swap (and will have
> >> a type of 'swap'), though it does not have to be swap.
> >> The other partitions; a, d, e, f, g, h, could be real partitions with
> >> something on them.   Almost certainly the 'a' partition will be root
> >> on a bootable slice.
> >
> > It turns out that I mixed up my drives. I found the boot drive - it could
> > not boot with my old custom kernel (unknown processor class...). I fell
> > back on kernel.GENERIC, which booted - to a point. It seems to bog down
> > when it tries to recognize the keyboard.
> >
> > I guess at this point my choices are:
> >
> > 1) build a new 4.x kernel on the new hardware
> > 2) find a working old computer and try my boot drive.
> >
> > Thank you all for your help...
>
> Another possible path:  Boot Freesbie or PC-BSD from CD-ROM and mount your
> old drives from there.  It might take running an fsck to clean up the old
> filesystems (depending on whether or not you clobbered them while trying to
> get this all to work).  'Just a thought - I take no responsibility if you
> hose your data though :)

Actually, I can now mount my old 4.x boot drive cleanly when I hook up this 
drive in a 6.2 machine.

However, I think I need to get the old boot drive to be able to boot, so I 
could then get to my other old drives, which are Vinum RAID-1.

I don't know if and how could I mount 4.x Vinum partitions under 6.2...

-- 
Joe Demeny