Cannot mount an older disk

[Charles Sprickman]

-- 
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet www.bway.net
spork at bway.net - 212.982.9800



> On Oct 9, 2019, at 4:05 AM, Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 08:32:16AM +0100, Bob Eager wrote:
>> On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 21:35:07 -0400
>> "Mikhail T." <mi+t at aldan.algebra.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello!
>>> 
>>> Going through older hard drives, I found one that still seems to work 
>>> and was curious, what's on it. The OS -- 12.1-STABLE -- sees it find. 
>>> The disklabel seems sane (except for the number of partitions):
>>> 
>>>    # /dev/ada1:
>>>    8 partitions:
>>>    #          size     offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
>>>       b:   12582912          0      swap
>>>       c: 1465149168          0    unused        0     0 # "raw" part,
>>>    don't edit
>>>       d: 1452566256   12582912    4.2BSD     8192 65536 52352
>>> 
>>> and there are ada1, ada1b, and ada1d entries under /dev. So far so
>>> good. Unfortunately, both mount and fsck tell me the same blatant
>>> lie, that the device does not exist:
>>> 
>>>    # fsck -y /dev/ada1d
>>>    Can't open /dev/ada1d: No such file or directory
>>> 
>>>    # mount /dev/ada1d /mnt
>>>    mount: /dev/ada1d: No such file or directory
>>> 
>>> Any suggestions? Thank you! Yours,
>> 
>> Custom kernel? If so, try booting GENERIC. Might be that a support fs
>> option is missing.
> 
> This is most likely a stray bsd label which appeared in the first (second ?)
> block of the disk due to some pecularities of old partitioning tools.
> Note the absence of the 'sN', i.e. MBR partition, between raw disk name
> and bsd slice.  Some time at 9 or 10 lifetime priorities changed due to
> switch to gpart.
> 
> I do not remember how this was worked around, most likely by zeroing second
> block of the disk.  Of course, it is better to do the experiment on a copy
> if the original is suspected to contain a useful information.

All of mine are old, and probably in “dangerously dedicated” mode.

Is there any reason that we’re not backwards-compatible or is it just something that was not tested?

I guess I could boot a 9.x live CD, but that would be kind of sad and make me feel like a Linux user. :)

C

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