hi everyone
i've managed to cripple my laptop after trying to restore some space on my
root partition using techniques based on flawed ideas,
the story start with my root partition being totally out of space which
caused me great problem when i came to using sysupgrade,
most of the space was taken up by the /dev directory,
so here comes the boo boo,
i thought without thinking it through that if i create a partition from the
spare space on my hard disk i could move the dev fils to the partition then
i could mount it on my /dev directory which would recover some usable
space in the root partition,
so i backed up the /dev directory and the /home partition with dump,
i destroyed the home partition with disklabel, created a partition for dev
then recreated the home partition again,
i mounted the new partitions in the /mnt directory then restored the home
backup to the new home partition,
i was the going to restore the dev backup but after some research i decided
to just copied MAKEDEV from /dev and recreate the devices with sh MAKEDEV
all.
I edited fstab with ed reassigned the new partition to the home entry and
added an entry to mount the dev partition on /dev.
i rebooted the laptop, the boot sequence completed all the way to the
x-window login, there was problem logging in with the normal user,
the login was accepted as correct but it failed to login, it just kept
returning me to the username and password prompt,
i left that issue for the moment to fix later, i could login as root which
shows that the problem has to do with my normal user login file,
something was missing or corrupted, so i had the laptop up a running as
root user,
dmesg showed me that the root partition was still full, so without thinking
it through i booted into single user mode and rm everything from /dev then
rebooted,
then the poo hit the fan and i realised that the laptop would be unable to
boot and mount the partitions as the files in /dev has to be accessible to
do the mounts in the first place.
I ended up doing a hard shutdown as the boot sequence stopped at that point.
my laptop is FDE with keydisk,
after the hard shutdown i tried to reboot in single user mode but
softriad0 threw errors saying
softriad0: sd2 was not shutdown properly
bioctl: KDF hint has invalid size
the next thing i tried was to boot up from an installation disk but i don't
know the commands to fix the softraid0 error and then mount it
here's some information about the drives
the laptop disk
disklabel -h -p g sd0
type: scsi
disk: scsi disk
size fstype
a: 1862g raid
c: 1862g unused
i: 0.3g msdos
the install usb stick
disklabel -h -p g sd1
type: scsi
disk: vnd device
size fstype
a: 0.6g 4.2bsd
c: 14g unused
i: 0.0g msdos
the usb keydisk
disklabel -h -p g sd2
type: scsi
disk: scsi disk
size fstype
a: 0.0g raid
c: 1.9g unused
i: 0.3g msdos
fsck sd0i, sd1a, sd1i, sd2i
i tried bioctl -c C -l /dev/sd0a softraid0
which returned the following errors
softraid0: sd2 was not shutdown properly
softraid0: sd2 was not shutdown properly
bioctl: KDF hint has invalid size
----------------------------------------------------------
could someone show me the command to
1 fix the softraid0 sd2 error
2 mount the softraid0 device
then i can
remove the dev partition
restore the /dev directory with MAKEDEV
then hopefully boot up normally
thanks shadrock
