Fellow Alpha OSF Managers,
I have been asked to help recover the system disk in a Alpha 433au system
that has a missing or corrupt disk label. Unfortunately I do not manage
this system and have limited Digital UNIX experience and no manuals (limited
man pages). To make matters worse, the owner of the system does not have
any backups of this disk.
The history of the problem is this:
The battery for the CMOS is dead. Not knowing this, someone turned the
system off. When they turned it back on, it tried to boot in Windows NT.
That failed since this is a UNIX system. I don't know what happened after
that. Later the system owner found directions to set the System Console to
UNIX and attempted to boot the system. The boot fails with the following
error message:
block 0 of dkc0.0.0.1004.0 is not a valid boot block
This is where I came in. I booted from the Digital UNIX 4.0E CD and went to
a shell prompt to try to examine the disk. I don't know if the filesystems
on the disk are AdvFS or UFS. The system owner claims AdvFS but I can't be
sure. I tried advscan but could not find anything because the disk label is
corrupt. I tried reading it with disklabel -r rz16 but all I get is:
Disk is unlabeled or, /dev/rrz16a is not in block 0 of the disk.
If I just use disklabel rz16 I get:
Invalid disk label (label is corrupt or disk is unlabeled)
Searching the mailing lists and newsgroups I found a few people who had
similar problems. The suggested fix was to run: scu -f /dev/rrz16c format.
My problem is that I don't want to damage the data on the disk. I assume
this command will erase the disk, is that correct? I didn't see any thing
in the man page that said exactly what 'format' does.
Is there any way I can rebuild a disklabel without damage to the filesystems
on the disk? I have access to two other 433au systems with the same disk
drive but with different partitions. Does the disk label contain the
partition information? Can I copy a disk label from one system to another?
The disk in question appears to be a RZ2CC-KA, but I can't find that in the
/etc/disktab file.
Thanks in advance. Please reply to me and I will summarize to the mailing
list.
Steve Remsing
The Dow Chemical Company
UNIX System Administrator
1776 Bldg / C-211
Phone: 989-636-2949
Fax: 989-638-9707
Email: sremsing_at_dow.com
Received on Mon Jan 07 2002 - 21:59:26 NZDT