forcing boot

[Garrett Cooper]

On Jun 4, 2006, at 2:40 PM, Lawrence Horvath wrote:

> How can i force normal boot up even if the filesystem was uncleanly  
> dismounted,
> i have a box that it looks like the HD is failing, but i still need
> some of the info off it, so i would like to get it to boot normally
> anyway so i can sftp/scp the files off it then i can replace the HD,
> but it refuses boot anything but single user mode.
>
> Thanks
>
> -- 
> -Lawrence

Don't think you can do that really because it's a failsafe with /etc/ 
rc. You may just want to try adding noauto to /etc/fstab for the time  
being so that booting doesn't halt on your system, then login and  
transfer all the data off your disk that you can. Since TERM isn't  
set in single-user mode, I've found learning how sed works is a very  
good thing to do. I believe this would fix your problem (can't test  
since my FBSD box has been down due to SCSI disk controller/PSU  
failure):

#!/bin/csh

FSTAB=/etc/fstab; #just a variable to reference the old fstab

if [ -ne $1 ]; then # the device filename length should be non-zero
  	cp -p $FSTAB $FSTAB.tmp; #backup the old fstab
	cat $FSTAB.tmp | sed -e s|^$1.*rw|$1.*rw,noauto|g > $FSTAB #replace  
rw for the old partition in fstab with rw,noauto
fi

-Garrett