On Tue, Apr 11, 2000 at 11:44:45PM -0500, Peter Seebach wrote:
> In message <200004120435.OAA28389@balrog.supp.cpr.itg.telecom.com.au>, Simon Bu
> rge writes:
> >On recentish version of NetBSD there should be disklabel backups in
> >/var/backups if you can still get to /var.  When something similar
> >happened to me a year or two ago I wrote a small program to scan the
> >entire disk looking for the superblock magic number in each sector.
> >I'll see if I can find it if you want...
> 
> No problem, Kevin P. Neal already sent it.

It's ffs_find.c, and it's in the mailing list archives. I guess
I could put a copy up on a web server if needed. ???

It doesn't work right under Digital UNIX 4.0 scanning a NetBSD
disk, but that was OK in my case. 
 
> I will say, though:  I'm *VERY* glad this is happening on a NetBSD box.
> We have great disaster-recovery tools.  One thing I wish we had, that BSDI
> has, is bootable CD's with a "complete" live filesystem.

On a PC, huh? Lemmie guess: You have a disk with a BSD label and no
DOS label. You used fdisk to add a DOS label. Blammo, the BSD label is
gone, even if the BSD partitions don't overlap the DOS partitioning. 

Been there. Done that. Had the output of disklabel in another xterm,
saving the day. Good thing, too: my 486 won't boot from a CD, and
I doubt I could get it to boot from a NIC.

(I fully intend to file a PR sometime. Really.)


Whatever happened to the multiplatform bootable CD that someone
(Ross?) came up with?

Even for a single-platform case, how difficult would it be to make a 
script that made a ready-to-burn image (bootable) from the distribution
tgz files?
-- 
XCOMM Kevin P. Neal:  Senior, CSC, NCSU    http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
XCOMM 
XCOMM "There are %d threatening little dwarves in the room with you."
XCOMM    -- BSD /usr/games/adventure source code.