*BSD News Article 76377


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!02-newsfeed.univie.ac.at!01-newsfeed.univie.ac.at!Austria.EU.net!EU.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.mathworks.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.primenet.com!whim!lclee
From: lclee@primenet.com (Larry Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Please explain the diff between wd0a and wd0s2a
Date: 18 Aug 1996 16:27:02 -0700
Organization: Primenet
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <lclee.537.021BF8A6@primenet.com>
X-Posted-By: @204.212.52.236 (lclee)
X-Newsreader: Trumpet for Windows [Version 1.0 Rev B final beta #4]


About two weeks ago I installed FreedBSD 2.1,
within a day or so after the install I upgraded to 2.1.5.

The system uses IDE drive which is shared between Win95 and FreeBSD.
Win95 is in slice 1 and FreeBSD is in slice 2.

Everything worked well for two weeks, and then the system refused to
boot. I had recently added mounting the dos partition and had one unsuccessful 
attempt at writing data to /dos, and that may have been the source of the
errors. 
After examining things in single user mode, I lost quite a fewinodes in the 
root partition. They are sequential from about inode 775about 830 (very 
approximate). Unfortunately these inodes happen toinclude the /dev/wd0s2f 
which is the /usr partition. I fixed everything up in single user mode, until 
fsck ran without errors and then ran mknod to rebuild the corrupted entries. 
/var and/sys were also affected, I patched that as well as I could.  So, I 
synced everything and rebooted. All the same problems came right back, in 
particular the /dev/wd0s2f entry was corrupted! So I figure I have a project 
for Monday.

There are several things that are not clear to me.

First there are device entries for wd0c with a major minor of [0,2]
and there are device entries for wd0s2c with a major minor of [0, 0x30002]

What is the difference between these and why is / mounted using wd0a and
/usr mounted using wd0s2f.  My initial thought was that wd0a must refer to
drives which do not have a DOS fdisk style master boot record. Any insight
to the nuances between these would be appreciated.

Obviously if anyone has an explanation of what I might have done to cause this
or prevent it from happening again, I would appreciate hearing that as well.

Larry

PS I've searched usenet and various web pages and can't find the answers
Please don't refer me to manpages as those are very accessable at the moment!