Hi All,
I am very pleased with the turn of events after I baked the disklabel
on my OBSD partition. A toast to all the hard work put in by OBSD
development team, and an offer for a free lunch/dinner/beer if you
happen to be in this part of India (Pune, closer to Mumbai/Bombay).
scan_ffs found all partitions, and I was successfully able to restore
everything. So this is what happened:
I was experimenting with boot loaders and finally settled on GRUB as
it allowed me to boot both Win XP and OBSD on my IBM ThinkPad X201. I
was booted into WinXP and was using "whole disk encryption" software.
Apparently, this encryption software marked the OBSD partition to be
encrypted as well (since it was visible through the Windows Volume
Manager as valid partition). Sure, it did not bother to check if
Windows filesystems were active, etc. To get out of that situation, I
deleted this partition from Windows, and GRUB conked with "Error 22"
(okay, should have thought that earlier -- but dumb moments happen).
Fortunately, all my data was backed up. I then booted into OBSD via
the boot CD, and cleared the partition table as well (second dumbest
moment). *poof* went away both operating systems.
Now I had a laptop with clean partition table, but both OS'es intact.
I wasn't worried to much since data was backed up, but was wary of
setting up OBSD again (including mail, etc.). So...
(1) I booted a live CD - MarBSD 5.1
(2) Ran scan_ffs on the drive as "scan_ffs -l sd0". It found almost
all partitions, but was confused between /var and swap (so /var
appeared twice!). I mounted both, and found which one was /var
(interestingly, the other partition had exactly same content as /var,
except for one sasl2 directory, and difference in size).
(3) Redirected the output to a file, to be used in setting up the disklabel.
(4) Ran "disklabel -e sd0", and added the output from scan_ffs, with
best guesses for partition names. [read scan_ffs and disklabel
manpages before this].
(5) Rebooted and checked if things were fine -- /bsd booted fine,
- However, later while mounting filesystems it stopped with
messages to the tune of "cannot mount sd0k and sd0j, etc.)
- These were not a part of the disklabel interestingly(!)
(6) Rebooted via OBSD 5.1 into single user mode "bsd -s"
(7) Mounted / manually, and fixed /etc/fstab with correct partition names.
(8) Reboot, and success! Everything was "as-is".
The output of scan_ffs can be seen in this image:
http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ln-xNFxx6WM/T-P6e4wgEMI/AAAAAAAAApA/zygztOh6uR8/s720/scan_ffs.jpg
Thanks OBSD team again. Appreciate all your efforts, and the terrific
OS. Many lessons learnt as well! :-)
-Amarendra
