March 26, 2004
Fun with UFS
Oh great.
Since my laptop's out of commission for a while, and since I'd thoughtfully backed up a couple of its filesystems just a couple of days before this happened, I thought I'd just restore a couple of pieces of my home dir and go along with e-mail, ICQ, and all that jazz. Unfortunately, it turned out that things were not quite so simple.
My laptop currently (well, when it's working, I mean) quadruple-boots between FreeBSD 4.x-STABLE, FreeBSD 5.x-CURRENT, Debian Linux and Windows XP. Unfortunately, when I decided to do the backup, I did it via booting FreeBSD 5.x into single-user mode, then, for some stupid reason or other, had to mount the filesystem containing my home dir as read-write instead of read-only... and dump(8) decided that since it was dumping a live filesystem, it would just create a snapshot and make a backup of that. That's all fine and dandy, except that filesystem snapshots seem to be dumped as UFS2, *not* UFS1 - and now I have a big UFS2 dump which I cannot restore on a FreeBSD 4.x machine, since 4.x's dump(8) does not grok UFS2 :(
Guess it's really time to sacrifice another machine and find a way to connect the laptop's HDD to a "real" IDE controller, so I can use it again... and *then* make a real UFS1 dump for future reference.
And before anyone takes this entry the wrong way: no, I'm not blaming either FreeBSD 5.x for coming up with a better UFS format, or 5.x's dump(8) for making UFS2 dumps of snapshots. These are both great and logical decisions; the problem was yours truly, dumping a live filesystem for no good reason at all.
Posted by roam at March 26, 2004 05:06 PM
