boot problem, disk mess.. thinking of suicide.

[Vladimir Mitiouchev]

2006/9/25, walt <wa1ter at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Not so fast!  I think you should explain how you fixed the
problem and share with us any valuable lessons you learned
from your adventure.  Did you find the plastic knife to be
of any use?
I ran LiveCD. Did some lost+found recovering to get base system
working. Than i found my fdisk and disklabel backups (Yeah, i really
do backups ;-). Recovering slices and partition tables, boot0cfg and
disklabel -B did the right thing. I booted into my system, getting
shell, because of missing /etc/rc and large part of a world. I
recovered mount_cd9660, mounted the LiveCD and copied missing /etc
stuff. It was amazing, but /usr/src was untouched! I ran make
installworld and things started to work again. My /home and some /mnt
stuff was alright too, so i began reconstructing system with
reinstalling packages. I wrote perl script that runs pkg_admin to find
missing packages/files and reinstall them. I stil have some /etc mess,
but i've found a lot of missing files in lost+found. /var is
completely smashed up too.
Lessons?
1. Do *NOT* use broken IDE cables.
2. BSD is amazing ;-) It couldn't be possible to get things working
without reinstall of whole system in Linux.
3. Backups of disklabel and fdisk is GOOD idea.
And plastic knife is waiting for some more serious problems.. It took
me about 6h to get all things working again ;-)
PS> You could ask, why didn't i did all that things from LiveCD?
That's simple, make installworld refused to complete because of old
kernel on LiveCD. And i wasn't sure if some stuff in LiveCD is too
old, which means more problems. Generally, i'm really impresed by
stability and f@!#$-up resistance of DF.. UFS is quite stable too.
PS2> Thanks God i wasn't running softupdates!

--
Sincerely Yours,
Vladimir Mitiouchev