bsd can't see disk (and neither can linux)
After about a year and a half, suddenly my maxtor 8.4G drive
is unusable by both freebsd and linux. I have a small linux
partition on the first partition/slice, windows 3.1 for the
kids on the second, and freebsd on the third. The FreeBSD is
3.4, while the linux is about a two years out of date debian
with ufs support.
For several months, the bsd bootloader has been unable to remember
that it should boot from the third rather than the first, and
had to be manually told to boot from the third on every boot.
Linux continued to work during that period.
Suddenly, freebsd can no longer boot at all. It fails to find the
slice when attempting to switch the root device. Booting from
the installation disks returns the message that no disk was found when
I try to mount/partition.
Linux has a similar behavior, but doesn't pause long enough for me
to see the messages :( I get a kernel panic during boot, which seems
to be for failing to find the device it is trying to mount. It
has the same response when lilo is told to boot single user.
The bottom line on the behavior is that windows works normally,
and that the bootloaders for both *nices are able to read the disk
but that both *nices are unable to find the hard drive at mount
time.
I've rechecked and reconnected the cables a couple of times.
Any ideas? And if all else fails, is there a dos or windows
program that can read a UFS partition?
NsoOthing critical is on the machine--except, of course, my completed
tax return. For the first time in over ten years I was ready on
the regular deadline, and had to file an extension. (OK, a
couple of other critical things, but they're backed up in multiple
places. )
rick, perplexed
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