disk recovery cd, for sparc
Hello,
The SCSI bus got into a resetting frenzy and I had
to turn off the computer and start up unclean.
Out of 14 filesystems, 13 failed to mount (to be fair,
3 were swap). The one that could mount was the boot
partition (/boot) and so I am able to boot
the machine if I give just the right incantation
(telling it where the image is).
I was able to fsck the root partition and now that
mounts too but there is piles of stuff in lost+found.
I know that I should try to use debugfs to rescue the
root partition (I want that /etc directory back!) and
the /home partition. But how can I get access to
debugfs without toasting what's already on the machine?
The debugfs program is there but it links to a missing
library libss.so.something.
What I have available to me:
The machine with the scrambled disk(s) is an ultra 1
with 2 hard disks, both bad.
sda1-7: scrambled (stuff I may want to rescue (all the disks
from a previous incarnation of this machine))
sdb1: boot partition (tiny)
sdb2: root partition (smallish)
sdb3: whole disk
sdb4: swap (256 meg)
sdb5: swap (256 meg)
sdb6: /usr 1.5 gig
sdb7: /home 4 gig
(going by memory)
Also I have a working sparc station 20, with Debian woody
installed. I have one monitor and two keyboard/mouse.
So I have to switch the monitor cable from the back of
one machine to the back of the other if I want to do stuff
with both. I don't have a monitor switch. However the
two machines are networked together, and I was able
to ping the ss20 from the ultra 1 (after calls to
ifconfig and route). Of course telnet no longer
exists (if it ever did) and ssh is out of the question.
I tried booting from the cd's that I got Woody (official)
on. (I had upgraded to Woody from Potato.) That works,
and I typed "rescue", but the tools available are minimal:
no debugfs.
Ok, I looked on the web for a bootable "recovery cd" with
debugfs (statically linked) and even found one but it is
for intel only.
I know very little about netbooting. Pointers to the
relevant documents welcome.
Also I see in debian-sparc a reference to booting with
root equal to /dist/blah/blah/144/initrd (point it to a root
image meant for floppy). Would this be useful for me?
Is debugfs on there?
What can I do to rescue these disks?
I do have backup tapes of the disks but they are 2 months
old, so I'd like to try to resurrect these scrambled disks
if possible.
I suppose I'm willing to install into sdb6 (/usr).
I'm worried that I'm mixing it up with sdb7 (/home) though.
All advice welcome. Thanks in advance.
--
bjb at achilles dot net
Debian http://www.debian.org
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