[SunHELP] Currupt superblock and alternates

[René Berber]

Reni Berber wrote:

> Reed Stoner wrote:
>
>> Having a bit of trouble with a scsi drive that has a bad superblock in
>> Solaris 9.  I've tried running fsck with an alternate super block and
>> it is still comming back with the error
>>
>> BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG
>> USE AN ALTERNATIVE SUPER BLOCK TO SUPPLY NEEDED INFORMATION
>> e.g. fsck [-F ufs] -0b=# [special...] where # is the alternative super
> block
>> Any alternative super block I try using newfs -N returns the same
>> error.  I'm trying to retreive the data on the drive because it
>> doesn't have any back up. (someone forgot to add this server to the
>> backup scheme) Any help would be handy.

Did you try using block 32?

I've seen "newfs -Nv" report wrong super-block numbers before, but that was a
long time ago and I don't think it was on Solaris.

> You can try to recover the disk with sformat (it does wonders with scsi
> disks).
>
> This means attaching the drive to a working computer, and using Joerg
> Schilling's sformat program which can be found pre-compiled on
> www.blastwave.org, look for "schilyutils".
>
> You can also compile it yourself but I don't know where the source is at
this
> time (Schilling's usual web page is not valid)... perhaps following a
> reference from cdrtools...

The source seems to be at: ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/sformat/sformat-3.5.tar.gz
.

You can also get sformat for another OS, for instance if you can install the
disk on a Linux/BSD computer (with the proper scsi interface and available
scsi id to use on the disk) you can repair it from there... there's several
Linux live CDs which contain sformat: http://grml.org/ .
--
Reni Berber