Thank you for the quick reply, Otto. I overlooked that option, which is kind of funny, I know it's saved my butt before. Anyway, I tried using alternate superblocks, several of them (picked at random from various spots within the ones named by newfs -N), and fsck is still dying with the same error message.
I have been able to mount the filesystem read-only. I'm not sure what else to do at this point. I feel like I'm overlooking something really obvious and foolish, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Anybody have any other ideas? On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 7:38 AM, Otto Moerbeek <o...@drijf.net> wrote: > > > I have an OpenBSD Virtual Machine (v.5.4) that, unfortunately, got shut > > down improperly the other day. This machine had a mounted partition > > /dev/rwd0j, which disklabel is reporting as a fstype of 4.2BSD (fsize > 2048, > > bsize 16384, cgp 1). The partition is completely full with an encrypted > > filesystem image, which was mounted at the time of the evil shutdown. > When > > I try to mount the (host [/dev/rwd0j]) partition, I receive an error > > telling me that the filesystem is not clean and I need to run fsck. > When I > > manually run fsck, I am receiving an error that the 'version of > filesystem > > is too old', and that I must update it to a more recent format with 'fsck > > -c 2', using a version of fsck that is from before release 5.0. > > > Unfortunately, I have vital services on this virtual machine that I > need to > > get running again as soon as possible for users other than myself. I > have > > not been able to locate any archive with a binary version of fsck for > i386 > > from a release of OpenBSD prior to 5.0, nor am I able to find any way > > around this, at least during the first few dozen times ramming my head > into > > the brick wall here. I would very much appreciate any ideas that anybody > > might have in order to get this filesystem clean and running again asap. > > Likely you superblock is corrupted, giving a spurious error message > concerning the fs version. > > Try using an alternate superblock, using the -b option (see man page).