URGENT HELP NEEDED - LOST /home and 35 Mbytes of stuff on SUN SPARC I

[Bala Rajaraman]

I have some major problems with a SCSI disk on the SUN SparcStation I. My
knowledge of disks,partitions etc. is poor but in any case the problem
follows.

The system on boot produces two diagnostic messages. The first one is

Cannot open: /dev/sd1h (Device or Address not found)
Giving up on:
	/home

This where the /home is mounted. I have basically lost the /home partition
and about 35Mbytes of stuff that was not backed up ( At least a good
fraction of it was not ). I used format-partition to print the label and
it does not show anything allocated to "h". Any diagnostics ??  I also
tried to mount the /dev/sd1a on /home and it works ok.  The description of
the problem is sketchy at best but I could provide more details to anyone
who could HELP.  The disk does not seem to be at fault because /dev/sd1a
is mounted on /var and it seems to be ok. A different problem occurs here.
When I do a "du" on /var the system prints panic: ..... and reboots.

The second problem is

CANNOT READ BLOCK: 201824

and this corresponds to /dev/sd1a.

The SUN manual says: "This should not happen, talk to a guru if it
does".

The two problems seems to be related.  I ran the whole gamut of
non-destructive tests from format-analyze.  No problems. I tried the
backup  command thinking the primary label went bad. No luck!!  I also
tried fsck. Does not recognize the device /dev/sd1h.  fsck on /dev/sd1a
gives be the CANNOT READ BLOCK message.  I tried mounting /dev/sd1c which
is the entire disk. The mount succeeds but I can see only the /var
directory.  This is where I ran out of ideas.

I would be grateful for any ideas regarding this problem.

Thanks
Bala Rajaraman
rajarar at hubcap.clemson.edu
(803)-656-5909
(803)-882-1809