machine will no longer boot

WarrenHead warrenhead at gmail.com
Mon May 28 16:05:23 UTC 2007


Hi list,

Yesterday I installed a new sata disk into my server, which is connected 
to a highpoint rocket raid card. I plugged in only one disk, so no raid yet.

I ran sysinstall and then fdisk and disklabel. All was fine and I placed 
files onto the disk. Then I realized I had made a mistake, I had made 
only one partition with fdisk, and two slices with disklabel.
(Mountpoints pointing to /mnt/x  and /mnt/y.)
Somehow I got another mountpoint automatically which mounted the entire 
disk as one, to /media/z. Weird.

So I ran sysinstall again and used fdisk to erase everything and create 
two partitions. I wrote these changes successfully to the disk.

I then started disklabel (still from within sysinstall) and created the 
two mount points for the two partitions again.
I tried to write these changes to the disk, but that failed.

Mmm, weird. So, perhaps I needed to reboot first?
Which I did, and now I cannot boot anymore.

The error messages that show on screen are something like this:
Can't stat /dev/ad4sd1 No such file or directory
Can't stat /dev/ad4se1 No such file or directory
After that I get a bogus shell which can do virtually nothing. I have no 
idea what it is.
I can cat /etc/fstab though and noticed that the two lines with 
mountpoints for the new disk are indeed the new lines. I guess disklabel 
was partially succesfull?

Perhaps I should simply remove these lines in /etc/fstab?
Unfortunately, with this ridiculous shell, I don't know how to.

So I tried a livecd (Knoppix 5.1). Since the system disk was formatted 
as ufstype=5xbsd, I have trouble writing to it. Bummer.

But... should I remove these lines in /etc/fstab? Will this matter?

Luckily I can read the disk, so if necessary I can start over, but I 
hope there is something I can do from within that odd shell.

Please advise, this particular problem is not fun.

Cheers, Warren


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