Problem with mounting rootvp

[JohnB]

Hi,

First of all my native language is not English, so sorry for bad grammatic, second my knowledge of FreeBSD is not much, I have very little general Unix knowledge.

About my problem:

We have from a customer, a very old PC with FreeBSD 5.4, running his web server. The problem of the PC is that the hardware inside died during a flood, but the old hard drives, running a software RAID1, was not damaged. We got the old hard drives up and running on some new hardware, but the costumer would like to exchange the hard drives also to new drives, so we took a one-to-one hardware clone of each old drive.

Now to my problem:
We can not boot the cloned hard drives, we get an error like:

ffs_mountroot: can't find rootvp
Root mount failed: 6

I searched a lot on Google, and find that people often suggest to try boot to single-user mode. I am not able to do that, we get the error what ever we try to do.

I really hope that somebody could help out.

BR
John B

 

[SirDice]

Support for FreeBSD 5.4 ended in October 2006. Don't try to get it running again. Build a new server with a recent FreeBSD version and see if you can salvage some of the data on the old disks.

Topics about unsupported FreeBSD versions

 

[wblock@]

The metadata for some RAID controllers is located before the actual data. Start searching for the FFS filesystem at an offset. I'd try 1M first. If you can identify the controller, someone might know the specifics. There is an example of using gnop(8) to skip over initial data at the end of the mdconfig(8) man page.

As SirDice says, do not try to update that system. Once you have access to the data, back it up. Install a current version of FreeBSD to new drives, then transfer just the data and adjust it to run on the new system.