Re: re-transmission: Re: Prepping to install

["William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>]

On 06/15/15 19:02, Robert Elz wrote:
>      Date:        Mon, 15 Jun 2015 17:35:47 -0453
>      From:        "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>
>      Message-ID:  <557F51CC.7090206%hiwaay.net@localhost>
>
>    | > Could you amplify on this point a bit ? How does it steal root ?
>
> The raidframe code, when it autoconfigures a raid array marked as being
> the root, changes whatever would have been picked as root, replacing it
> with the raid (raidNa - if you're using wedges rather than a disklabel,
> inside the raid device, you need a wedge labelled as "raidNa" for whatever
> is the appropriate "N").   When everything is working, it is great, as it
> makes the root be where you want it to be regardless of how device naming
> changes, but when it doesn't ...
>
>    | *C'mon* !!!! How about a clue here ?
>
> The suggestion that was made earlier (boot -a) would be the normal way,
> then you get to override the root setting, very late in the boot process.
>
> But as (for whatever reason) your keyboard isn't working at the point
> where you would do that, it gets hard...


*Aaaaaahhhhh*, OK, I replied to that suggestion earlier, my boot process 
hung at the point where it asked for what root drive to use, sorry, it 
might have gotten lost in the wash of traffic ....


>    | how do I recover ? Pull the 2 offending
>    | drives & dd a bunch of zeroes to the 1st few KB ?
>
> That is more or less what you will need to do, but you will need something
> other than NetBSD to do it, as if either of the drives is connected at
> boot (before it is fixed) it will be enough for that to steal root, then
> as it doesn't have enough of /dev (which I think the problem was) to actually
> boot, you're stuffed...
>
> So you might need to use something other than NetBSD - either that, or
> stick the drives in a USB enclosure, and plug them in after NetBSD is
> booted.   If you can do that, you could just config the raid, and then
> turn off the autoconfigure flag (or the root flag), which would leave
> everything else intact.
>
> If you do it using some other OS (a live boot from DVD or USB of FreeBSD
> or linux should do, without actually installing) I'd zap at least several MB
> to make sure that you get the raidframe headers.


That seems to be the rub, I can't boot *anything* else, it still tries 
to boot the (now fried) RAID1 disks :-/ .... As you said earlier, when 
it works, it is serendipity, when not, not so much ....


> Before you turn on autoconfig root next time, you should set up the
> raidframe, get everything on it that you think should be needed, then
> chroot into it, and test that everything that matters seems to work
> (fsck is a good test - not so much for the quality of the filesystem
> data, but because it checks lots of stuff is correctly installed.)
>
> kre



--

	William A. Mahaffey III

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