Trouble swapping bootdisk to different controller

Heinrich Rebehn rebehn at ant.uni-bremen.de
Mon Jan 31 02:28:49 PST 2005


Hello all,

Since the SATA controller which i had been using for my bootdisk is not 
fully supported, i decided to swap the disk to the other SATA controller.
This resulted in an unresolvable, annoying mess.

After adjusting the BIOS boot config, the kernel asked me where to mount 
the root fs from. After some probing, i figured out it was ufs:ad7s2a.
Of course the kernel count not mount the remaining fs because fstab was 
still referring to ad0s2*.

Some of the obstacles i experienced:
- /sbin not in PATH, why?
- vi not available
- keyboard layout not set (i use german keyboard, luckily i am quite 
familiar with the US layout)
- weird device numbering: why can't the first disk be assigned to ad0???
- I then decided to try and edit fstab with sed (of course sed was not 
there), but it would not have helped me anyway, because the root fs was 
mounted -ro.
I then tried to remount the root fs -rw:

# mount -u -rw / ==> /dev/ad0s2a not configured
# mount -u -rw /dev/ad7s2a / ==> /dev/ad7s2a: No such file or directory
Creating the missing dev file of course failed because rootfs was 
mounted -ro.

So i can't remount the root fs because the dev file is missing and i 
can't create the dev file because the root fs is mounted -ro

Needles to mention that man mount was also not available.

Is there any way out ??? :-( :-( :-(
--
Heinrich Rebehn

University of Bremen
Physics / Electrical and Electronics Engineering
- Department of Telecommunications -
Phone : +49/421/218-4664
Fax   :            -3341




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