Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!viswswrn
From: viswswrn@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (V. Visweswaran)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Block special file for filesystem seems to be lost
Message-ID: <4425@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 2 Dec 90 00:12:38 GMT
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
Distribution: usa
Organization: Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Lines: 39


        I look after a MIPS RC2030 at our lab. Maybe someone can help 
me with something really strange that seems to have happened to the
machine. 
	I needed to stop the BSD line printer daemon for a reason, 
and therefore I issued a 'kill -9' command to do this. This seemed to 
work fine. But immediately, the system really went crazy. When I issued 
a 'ps -ef' command, it gave an error message saying something like

 ps : ftw() failed - no such file or directory. 

A number of the system commands seemed to fail. For example, issuing "who"
gave an answer of ".". I could not see any solution to this, so I did a 
couple of sync's and brought the system down with an "init 0". Then, I 
tried to bring the machine back up, but when it reached the stage where 
it needed to fsck the file systems, it failed. 
	We have the root and the '/usr' filesystems on a single 172Mb disk, 
with '/usr' on partition 2. When I checked the corresponding entry for 
/dev/usr, I found something similar to the following :

-r-xr-xr-x  1 root	   24368  July 25, 1989 usr 

	For some reason, the system says that this file is no longer a 
block special device. As a result, I can no longer mount '/usr' on the
system. The root system can be mounted, and so can another file system
called '/usr1' that corresponds to a different disk. 
	The system still gives an error message to the "ps" command
and to some other commands like 'who'. Also, when I do an fsck.ffs on
the root file system, it does not work, while it works for the '/usr1' 
file system. 
	I am really stumped about what to do. Perhaps someone knows what
is happening. Thanks in advance. 
		
				   -- V. Visweswaran
				   	  (vishy)
			           Mail: viswswrn@phoenix.princeton.edu
					 vishy@catinhat.princeton.edu
				   Dept. of Chemical Engineering
				   Princeton University