hi. this is a pretty complex story, so i'll keep it short.

i was trying to move the data off my 250mb quantum onto a new 1gb disk i
got so i could set my ftp site up on something more stable than my mac
server, but i ran into problems.

while doing a cp-Rp on a directory to copy it across from the one disk to
the other, the process hung. I tried a kill-9 and it didn't respond. I
tried a reboot and that stuck in the 'syncing disks' bit. I turned the
se/30 off, then back on, and now it refuses to boot. It sticks in something
about nubus (if i try boot from the original 250mb disk).

ok, not too serious - only annihilated months of work. the next part is serious.

i installed from scratch on my new 1gb (conner) and can boot up, however,
fsck freaks out and says it can't do this disk and i must do it manually.
so i get a # prompt and type fsck /dev/sd1a and it says, forget it, there
are some bummed sectors here. i believe it names the last few sectors of
the disk (huge numbers in the region of 180 000). fsck then either core
dumps or, more usually, just gets an exception and exits.

ok, so now if i try mkfs on the mac side of things, i have 3 partitions -

swap
usr&root
untitled (using fwb primer to format).

when i run mkfs, it sees all three and i try format the untitled partition,
and it does it and says 'i don't remmer any errors' - BUT before it starts
it *does* say, "warning, 690 unused sectors". I presume that is what is
causing fsck to freak out. So how do i force it to fully format that disk?
it seems to format most of it and just leave out the last few sectors. the
result is then that fsck refuses to give a thumbs up to the disk..

the story gets worse.

so after trying to fsck, it doesn't work, so i try continue in the boot
process. i type 'exit' and it continues running the stuff in /etc/rc

it then either asks for root login and lets me do a few things (makes the
fs writable just fine), or it dies at that point. if it lets me continue,
it periodically comes up on the screen with weird errors about requesting
(a whole load of hex numbers) - and it prints this error a few times over.
It then lets me continue, but as i say, periodically shows these errors up.
eventually, it does the same thing: dies. (drops me into the debugger).

i try exit the debugger and try reboot, but that just sticks in some kind
of countdown loop. so i turn it off.

to summarise:

- my 250mb won't boot and sticks in some crap about nubus JUST AFTER
'preserving xyz bytes'. I presume a reinstall will fix this but i couldn't
be bothered since it's the other disk i want to use as my boot disk from
now on.

- my 1gb will boot but soon dies because fsck/the kernel itself doesn't
like the disk - reports bad/unused sectors and names about 5 sectors before
exiting with an exception. As i say, i *think* this is because the mkfs
program didn't fully format it. I really do not want to format from unix
CLI because that means reinstalling *again* (done it twice). A weird point
too: despite having a separate 'untitled' partition, netbsd mounts
'untitled' and 'root&usr' as if they were the same partition - so i cannot
run formatting tools from root&usr to hit 'untitled' because as far as
netbsd is concerned, there is no separate partition. weird weird weird!


any ideas? i'm really desperate. I've been down 2 days now because of this.
please help! i'm totally at my wits' end.

thanks guys.

_________________________________________________________________________
John Ostrowick
Computer Science Department, University of the Witwatersrand
1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, South Africa. 1st Floor, Senate House 1012
Phone: +27 (011) 716-3783
jon@cs.wits.ac.za or jon@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za or jon@is.co.za
My web page is on my server's: http://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/
My ftp site: ftp://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/macenroe/pub/
My listserv: subscr@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za (any message with a body)