halton@unc.UUCP (John Halton) (10/28/86)
Is there someone out there who has a CALLAN DATA SYSTEMS "Unistar 100/200"
Motorola 68000 workstation and is knowledgeable about (i) hardware or (ii)
software? The company went out of business the hard way (i.e., all phones
cut off and all help unavailable with no forwarding address---or does any-
one know where I can reach help?) My unit has gone sour on me and I have
been unable to restore it in about five weeks of trying (some of which was
waiting time for the "markbad" program.
I have an elderly backup (a "w2f" backup from February 1986), which I
believe is a full hard-disk (in my case a Micropolis 43 MB 5.25" drive)
image, from a time when the machine worked, and a 6-diskette "cpio" backup
which I managed to extricate from my ailing machine before it got REALLY
sick.
When I finally received the "markbad" disk, I first reformatted the hard
disk (using a boot-up floppy to enter the system) and then (having read
the list of bad blocks on the label of the Winchester---necessitating
the physical extraction of the drive) read-in the list under "markbad".
I then executed the full "f2w" 69-diskette restore and the machine then
booted-up apparently correctly, except for a file-system snarl-up (not
evident on the original state of the system at backup time) leading to
a horrendous (and UNREMOVABLE, by "rm") file system under "/lost+found".
I proceeded to restore the recent files from my "cpio" diskettes, and
everything {except "fsck", which gave bad and repeated diagnostics about
"DUP" inodes and out-of-range numbers (connected with the humungous
"/lost+found" file which has names apparently parts of an "ls -alis"
output, which are not removable...this sounds to me like a bad block not
on the Micropolis list messing up a directory listing somewhre in the
"root" system; however, Micropolis, when asked, said that it probably
wasn't the hardware (they know nothing of disk controllers, let alone
Unix!)} worked fine [Parse THAT sentence...]
When I logged-out (it wasn't the first time since restoring), I could NOT
log in again (the system would accept my legitimate logins and passwords
---I used all I knew---and would purr along for a few seconds and then
scroll back to a new "login: " sequence.
I really don't know what to do next, or whom to ask, or even exactly WHAT
to ask!! I neeed (i) a complete fix, or, failing that, (ii) indications
on how I can rescue my personal and personalized files [I have three
years' work there, in a diskette format known only to Callan!!], and (iii)
where I can restore the system to initial state and begin life again.
Any help or suggestions or just sympathy would be very welcome! Thanks.