Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!news.gmi.edu!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!csn!nntp-xfer-2.csn.net!bhi.com!jasmine!bwherry From: bwherry@bhi.com (bradley g wherry) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Corrupted filesystem with Adaptec 2940 Date: 10 Nov 1995 21:44:02 GMT Organization: Bolder Heuristics Inc. Lines: 46 Message-ID: <480h33$3im@yggdrasil.bhi.com> References: <47me1i$gue@netnews.upenn.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: jasmine.bhi.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Scott Alexander (salex%/etc/HOSTNAME) wrote: : I've brought up FreeBSD on 2 different machines and each time, my filesystem : has become corrupted. The machines in question are Pentium 133's (Tyan : Does anyone have any insight on what could be causing this? well... We have 4 Freebsd systems identically configured with: ASUS P55TPXE4, A2940, 16MB 60ns RAM, Pentium 90, Cirrus Logic ISA video, SMC PCI net card. We are using Seagate 2GB Hawk drives. Each system has from 1 to 4 drives depending on system function. We are using FreeBSD-2.0.5. A2940 configured to use native geometry. I had a *significant* amount of difficulty justting getting the boot loader installed and executed by the BIOS... I had to do a low-level format, use the 2.1.0-SNAP boot disk, install the boot code, reboot with the 2.0.5 install disk and then do the install. After few hours of load the system would start behaving strangely, illegal instructions in various programs, bus errors etc. Rebooting at this point would find that the system file systems : /, /usr were totally hosed. During the install process the only way I could get the install/partition program to correctly identify the geometry of the drive was immediately after a low-level format. Otherwise it would come up with some very bizarre geometries... Even though the geometry was correctly identified after the low level format FreeBSD always stated that the geometry was incorrect. If I reset the geometry from a bizarre setting to the correct setting FreeBSD would tell me the geometry was incorrect. My guess is that somewhere in the partition or OS the geometry was not really correct and that swapping was occuring over /, and /usr ... thus rendering the system useless after a few days. That was in native mode... Setting the controller to do DOS translations and then putting down a DOS fdisk partition caused the freebsd installation process to work the first time tried and without any hiccups. Doing this cost 2MB of the drive's capacity... but hey, drives are cheap. We have been running for 20 hours without any strangeness occuring. Hopefully that fixed it... brad