FreeBSD drops to single user mode

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Friday, January 27, 2006 22:49:25 +0000 RW 
<list-freebsd-2004 at morbius.sent.com> wrote:

> On Friday 27 January 2006 21:36, Paul Schmehl wrote:
>> Recently I experienced something that surprised me.  I have a workstation
>> with two SATA drives.  The second drive is data only and is mounted r/w
>> when the OS boots.  We had a user whose (Windows) computer crashed and
>> they wanted to know if we could recover the data.
>>
>> I said I'd see, and I unplugged the second drive (ad5 on FreeBSD, drive1
>> on Windows) and plugged in the suspect drive, fully expecting to mount
>> it and copy files over.  But, when FreeBSD booted, it failed to read ad5
>> and then dropped to single user mode.
>> ...
>> Here's my fstab, if that illuminates anything:
>>
>> ...
>> /dev/ad5s1d             /files          ufs     rw              2       2
>
>
> If you neglected to comment-out this line, FreeBSD would be looking for
> this  partition, which doesn't exist on the Windows drive.
>

I suspected that was the case, but if so, why did mount -a work?

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/