won't boot after 8.0-RELEASE upgrade

[Tom Worster]

On 12/8/09 5:21 PM, "Polytropon" <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:

> On Tue, 8 Dec 2009 14:09:16 -0800 (PST), Ivo Karabojkov <ivo at kit-bg.com>
> wrote:
>> So I'd like to know how
>> to distinguish mode of my current filesystems - is it standard or
>> dangerously dedicated?
> 
> If you've first created a slice on the disk, and then
> partitions inside the slice, it's standard mode, e. g.
> 
> ad0   a    b       d       e       f       g
> {  [  (/)  (swap)  (/tmp)  (/var)  (/usr)  (/home)  ]  }
>   s1
> 
> If you've omitted the slice, and created the partitions
> on the disk device itself, it's dangerosly dedicated mode, e. g.
> 
> ad0
> {  (/)  (swap)  (/tmp)  (/var)  (/usr)  (/home)  }
>   a    b       d       e       f       g
> 
> You can tell by the existence of ad0s1[adefg] vs. ad0[adefg]
> in /dev, or by trying to print the disks's slice table.

thank you. that's good to know.

now that i know that my machine was not using DD mode before the upgrade to
8.0, it seems there ought to be a chance to make it boot.

the boot loader can see the partitions ad4s1[abdef] but the 8.0 kernel that
was installed with freebsd-update can't. isn't there some trick with dd to
zero out the geom metadata and makes the partitions look like ordinary
again?

(i was about 30 hours into copying the data off the disk to another machine
when my router died so i'm back at square 1 now, which was described in my
email at 11.14am est on dec 3rd.)