weber@brand.UUCP (Allan G. Weber) (05/04/87)
I could use some advice on how to restore a destroyed root partition on a MicroVAX-II running Ultrix-32m 1.2A. The root partition has gotten bashed badly enough that when booting, fsck gives up while checking the root partition and the system start trying to boot all over again, and again, and again, etc. I have a backup of the disk and all I want to do is get something running to the point where I can read the root partition from tape back onto disk. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the Ultrix documentation about how to restore a damaged root partition. I tried doing basically the same things that are described in the installation notes for 4.2BSD and Sun Unix. I followed the normal Ultrix installation procedure up to the point where it had copied a minisystem to the disk. After booting that it asked if I wanted to procede with the installation, and I said no, which got me a # prompt and a message to halt the system or something like that. At that point, I figured I could create the root partition and restore the files from tape but "newfs" and "restore" didn't seem to be there. Neither was "ls" so I couldn't figure out what was there. This has happened before, and at that time a DEC field service person who replaced the disk drive called their Ultrix support people and asked what I should do. DEC's answer was to do a full installation of the complete Ultrix (/ and /usr) from the distribution tape. After booting the new system, restore the backup root partion to another partition somewhere, and copy files from the restored one to the new one until it's set up the way it was before. Then restore the backup /usr in place of the new one. I make no claims to be a Unix wizard, but this seems like a stupid way to do things. Allan Weber weber%brand@usc-oberon.arpa ...sdcrdcf!usc-oberon!brand!weber
romain@pyrnj.uucp (Romain Kang) (05/06/87)
In article <1085@brand.UUCP> weber@brand.UUCP (Allan G. Weber) writes: | I followed the normal | Ultrix installation procedure up to the point where it had copied a | minisystem to the disk. After booting that it asked if I wanted to | procede with the installation, and I said no, which got me a # prompt | and a message to halt the system or something like that. At that | point, I figured I could create the root partition and restore the | files from tape but "newfs" and "restore" didn't seem to be there. | Neither was "ls" so I couldn't figure out what was there. When you're left in the miniroot in Ultrix 1.1 and 1.2, you can see what files are around by using "echo .??* *". /bin/cat is not there, but you can use "dd if=/.profile" as a substitute for "cat /.profile". If you have a dd copy of root, you can simply dd from backup tape to your normal root partition. The rest of the distribution media (last I saw) comes from tar tapes or floppies. mkfs and tar are provided, so you can build a full partition where / or /usr might normally go (provided they reside on supported controllers and media) and read "restore" in. (The boot system on a floppy is read-only; I don't remember what's on the distribution tape.) Good luck... -- Romain Kang {allegra,cmcl2,mirror,pyramid,rutgers}!pyrnj!romain Pyramid Technology Corp. / 10 Woodbridge Center. Dr / Woodbridge, NJ 07095 "Eggheads unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks!" -Adlai Stevenson