Trying to recover data from FreeBSD 4.11 system

[Joe Demeny]

On Thursday 14 February 2008 12:04:11 pm you wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 01:08:35AM -0500, Joe Demeny wrote:
> [...]

> Use fdisk to find out how it sees the drive.  Do     fdisk ad1
> and check out what it says.   Especially look to see what slices
> that fdisk thinks it has.   Maybe there is only an  s1  active
> with anything in it.  That would be easiest and very common.
>
> Then use bsdlabel to look at what partitions are defined in any
> of the slices.     do ad1s1  (for slice 1,  ad1d2  as well
> if there is a slice 2 being used, etc)
> From root, do  bsdlabel ad1d1     and see what partitions are defines.
> Remember that partition 'c' is not a real partition, but a label to
> define the whole slice to the system (it will have a type of 'unused')
> and that in most cases partition 'b' is used for swap (and will have
> a type of 'swap'), though it does not have to be swap.
> The other partitions; a, d, e, f, g, h, could be real partitions with
> something on them.   Almost certainly the 'a' partition will be root
> on a bootable slice.

It turns out that I mixed up my drives. I found the boot drive - it could not 
boot with my old custom kernel (unknown processor class...). I fell back on 
kernel.GENERIC, which booted - to a point. It seems to bog down when it tries 
to recognize the keyboard.

I guess at this point my choices are:

1) build a new 4.x kernel on the new hardware
2) find a working old computer and try my boot drive.

Thank you all for your help...

-- 
Joe Demeny