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From: miquels@maestro.htsa.aha.nl (Miquel van Smoorenburg)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Need help with disk partition problems
Message-ID: <2977@maestro.htsa.aha.nl>
Date: 20 Jun 91 17:50:01 GMT
References: <1991Jun19.173449.1221@viewlogic.com->
Sender: bin@htsa.htsa.aha.nl
Organization: AHA-TMF, Polytechnical Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lines: 54

In article <1991Jun19.173449.1221@viewlogic.com-> greg@viewlogic.com (Gregory Larkin) writes:
->
->Hi there,
->
->I posted a message a day ago about problems with
->Shoelace hanging while trying to boot Minix on the
->2nd partition of my hard disk.  I read the notice
->about partitions created with V1.3 mkfs and decided
->to try to fix the odd-sector problem.
->
->My DOS partition ends on sector 15910 and the Minix
->partition starts on partition 15912.  It looks like
->Shoelace expects the partition to start at sector
->15911.  I simply used fdisk to move the partition
->one sector down.  I think this was a bad thing to
->do (admittedly I don't know a lot about this kind
->of stuff).  Anyway, that didn't work (root FS 
->corrupted), so I changed it back.  It still doesn't
->work!
->
->The super block listing has all zeroes in the entries.
->Is there any way I can restore the super block of the
->file system?
->
->Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!
->
->Thanks,
->
->-- 
->Greg Larkin (ASIC Engineer)|"This is a fragile ball we are living on; 
->Viewlogic Systems, Inc.    |it's a miracle and we are destroying it.."
->293 Boston Post Road West  |Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil               
->Marlboro, MA 01752  (greg@Viewlogic.COM)

I don't know anything about shoelace - however, repairing a superblock
is doable. I did this myself quite a few times when I was experimenting
with symbolic links - I trashed my root partition quite a few times (Uch).
You'll have to boot up Minix from a floppy - I have an emergency floppy
for this, with stuff like fsck, badblocks, but especially
--mknod-- and --de--. With mknod, I made a filesystem on an empy
disk (or diskette - mknod has a flag that tells it not to check the
size of the device) just as big and with just as many inodes as on the
disk with the bootblock I wanted to restore. Then I copied the first
two blocks (boot+super) OVER my trashed superblock - and voila. Now
if you have come so far, you only need "de" to restore the rest of the
disk.

May I say - Happy Hacking??
Miquel.
-- 
---
%    Miquel van Smoorenburg, Baljuwstraat 20, 2461 SL Langeraar, Holland    %
%  miquels@drinkel.nl.mugnet.org         miquels@maestro.htsa.aha.nl        %
%              God is real, unless declared integer..                       %