Booting Problem After Power Loss (fsck)?

[Rishi Chopra]

Good news and bad news:

Good News: System seems to have recovered.  Booting into single user 
mode and running fsck worked great for / and /var, but did nothing for 
my /usr partition with all my data.  After letting fsck run on my /usr 
partition for 4 days, the raid controller appeared to stall and the 
machine did not return to a prompt.  Regular boot (multi-user mode) 
somehow worked where it would not work before, and background fsck on 
the /usr partition eventually ended.  The system is now up and 
reachable, which is all I care about.

Bad News: No one who read my last message offered to help.  I suppose 
you can draw your own conclusions about the community-like nature of 
FreeBSD use in the Bay Area (home to UC Berkeley, FreeBSD Mall, and 
birthplace of the FreeBSD movement.)

-- 
Rishi Chopra
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~rchopra

Rishi Chopra wrote:
> I do not have the FIX-IT CD or another FreeBSD machine.
> 
> Is there another fellow FreeBSD'er in the Bay Area, CA that can 
> volunteer to help me troubleshoot the card as described below (e.g. plug 
> in the card and break to debugger to gather info)?  I can drive over to 
> your place or you can come over to my house (directions on my homepage).
> 
> If it helps, my perspective is that meeting up is totally positve and 
> the only thing left keeping me involved with computing - allow me to 
> explain:
> 
> The server was totally idle when the power was cut, and I didn't make 
> any changes while the server was down.  I've seen some crazy things 
> working on computers before (I can show you a list, post one to the 
> newsgroup, or if you're curious you can try searching the google groups 
> link on my homepage.)  This would by far have to the most stubborn, 
> underhanded, mean, nasty and implausable error I've ever come accross.
> 
> I could really use some help getting the filesytem up again; my heart 
> can't take another failure like this, and I'm ready to give up computers 
> (recreationally and professionally) if I can't get this problem fixed. I 
> had just finished recovering from a 2 year reconsolidation of life and 
> data (a 75GXP/Raid-0 failure and data loss occurred while I was studying 
> at UC Berkeley and triggered a very nasty chain of events culminating in 
> this problem.)  I can't handle going through another data consolidation; 
> recovering from a recent thyroid removal and a 12-hour neck 
> dissection/removal is a full-time affair, and the 30 some-odd staples in 
> my neck greatly limit my ability to sit at the computer.
> 
> Looks like the important thing is for me to make a new friend in the 
> FreeBSD community and a new start on computing, or bid y'all adieu.
>