Oh, and I also did re-install grub as a last step. Now remains the task of getting back the Windows OS. :-)
-Amarendra On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Amarendra Godbole <amarendra.godb...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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/zygztOh 6uR8/s720/scan_ffs.jpg > > Thanks OBSD team again. Appreciate all your efforts, and the terrific > OS. Many lessons learnt as well! :-) > > -Amarendra
