*#* ISC Bootstrip Wanted. A Dangerous Bag *#*
Antoni Bronislaw Przygienda
aprzygie at iiic.ethz.ch
Tue Nov 13 17:46:59 AEST 1990
Hello in the outer space,
First a 'please send me', second 'description of a very nasty
thing on ISC could happen to you (interessting)
1. Could someone send me the dump of his bootstrap of
the main unix partition ???!!!
You can find it as follows:
a) look at partition table, your main Interactive
partitions starts at cylinder _X_
b) take something you can look at absolute sectors
of your hd & go to this cylinder, track 0,
sector 0
c) dump the following 32 block as hex or octal
(in ascii, so you can mail it) & send it to me,
please, please, please !!!!
2. Description (why does a crazy swiss want a bootstrap, I
can't imagine, & I say, one day, it could happen to
you, you or even YOU [yes, you, sitting in front of
your terminal now & drinking coffee]).
Story:
a) like one year ago: formatted 90% of
my HD as ISC & 10% as DOS (usual, isn't?)
(the dos one /dev/dsk/0p1 went from
cylinder 2 to 150)
b) like 1/2 ago, formatted the DOS partition
(0p1) as Unix, 'cause it works so fine &
c) making a file system on 0p1, it want's
to know, how many blocks does it have ??
d) Where to find it ? No idea, OK, took my
HP & cylinders*tracks*sectors = _Y_
(*****something went wrong & I got like
30 blocks too much (probably 1 track
or so ??!!)*****)
Gave her (I tend to speak 'bout ISC as
a her, it's almost like the sea, it
always takes & never gives) this magic
number, created the file system & went
straight to bed.
e) next 1/2 I was mostly happy working with
it, except it sometimes had a corrupted
free list, even after normal shutdown &
during boot time the 0p1 was not corrected,
so I had to mount it by my own.
f) something like before yesterday, the 0p1
went full, ok I thought, no problem,
cleaned something like tmp* and *.bak
and made a normal shutdown at night time
g) **** BANG **** Yesterday booting it ---
Invalid boot descriptor
???????????????????????????????????
h) ok, one day later I know, the first 30
block were MY BOOTSTRAP of the active
unix partition lying above the 0p1
one, got overwritten by the 0p1
going full !!!!!!!!!!
i) don't tell me, I should try mkpart or
take my sector backup, I only have the
file system backups & the mkpart brings
some thousands of excuses, why I can't
generate a new bootstrap
for example:
-invalid dpinfo (even with an -i)
-no alternate partition ???? ;-)
-no root partition ???? ;-)
My vendor told me:
'Oh, just format it & backup again'
I don't want to do it !!! Have a lot of
better things to do than 2 days of backuping
& of cause, my backup something like 2 weeks
old & I did a lot of system work during
this time.
h) taking the bootstrap from the disk doesn't
work, it boots, but then it wants to take
take the system from the disk
Please mail your bootstrip to me, I'm begging you
Tony
PS: By the way, what do YOU think 'bout the ISC Update policy
Hello in the outer space,
First a 'please send me', second 'description of a very nasty
thing on ISC could happen to you (interessting)
1. Could someone send me the dump of his bootstrap of
the main unix partition ???!!!
You can find it as follows:
a) look at partition table, your main Interactive
partitions starts at cylinder _X_
b) take something you can look at absolute sectors
of your hd & go to this cylinder, track 0,
sector 0
c) dump the following 32 block as hex or octal
(in ascii, so you can mail it) & send it to me,
please, please, please !!!!
2. Description (why does a crazy swiss want a bootstrap, I
can't imagine, & I say, one day, it could happen to
you, you or even YOU [yes, you, sitting in front of
your terminal now & drinking coffee]).
Story:
a) like one year ago: formatted 90% of
my HD as ISC & 10% as DOS (usual, isn't?)
(the dos one /dev/dsk/0p1 went from
cylinder 2 to 150)
b) like 1/2 ago, formatted the DOS partition
(0p1) as Unix, 'cause it works so fine &
c) making a file system on 0p1, it want's
to know, how many blocks does it have ??
d) Where to find it ? No idea, OK, took my
HP & cylinders*tracks*sectors = _Y_
(*****something went wrong & I got like
30 blocks too much (probably 1 track
or so ??!!)*****)
Gave her (I tend to speak 'bout ISC as
a her, it's almost like the sea, it
always takes & never gives) this magic
number, created the file system & went
straight to bed.
e) next 1/2 I was mostly happy working with
it, except it sometimes had a corrupted
free list, even after normal shutdown &
during boot time the 0p1 was not corrected,
so I had to mount it by my own.
f) something like before yesterday, the 0p1
went full, ok I thought, no problem,
cleaned something like tmp* and *.bak
and made a normal shutdown at night time
g) **** BANG **** Yesterday booting it ---
Invalid boot descriptor
???????????????????????????????????
h) ok, one day later I know, the first 30
block were MY BOOTSTRAP of the active
unix partition lying above the 0p1
one, got overwritten by the 0p1
going full !!!!!!!!!!
i) don't tell me, I should try mkpart or
take my sector backup, I only have the
file system backups & the mkpart brings
some thousands of excuses, why I can't
generate a new bootstrap
for example:
-invalid dpinfo (even with an -i)
-no alternate partition ???? ;-)
-no root partition ???? ;-)
My vendor told me:
'Oh, just format it & backup again'
I don't want to do it !!! Have a lot of
better things to do than 2 days of backuping
& of cause, my backup something like 2 weeks
old & I did a lot of system work during
this time.
h) taking the bootstrap from the disk doesn't
work, it boots, but then it wants to take
take the system from the disk
Please mail your bootstrip to me, I'm begging you
Tony
PS: By the way, what do YOU think 'bout the ISC Update policy
More information about the Comp.unix.sysv386
mailing list