FreeBSD and the problem of corruption

[Bully_Crist]

yea, yea, I know you're supposed to type 'reboot' from root to reboot the system, but, what would happen if I had just freshly booted up the system, it was sitting at the console prompt waiting for someone to log on (possibly running the screensaver), and someone, say my mom, decided to hit the manual reboot switch on the computer.

would I be royally screwed?

[pointreyes]

Originally posted by Bully_Crist:
<STRONG>yea, yea, I know you're supposed to type 'reboot' from root to reboot the system, but, what would happen if I had just freshly booted up the system, it was sitting at the console prompt waiting for someone to log on (possibly running the screensaver), and someone, say my mom, decided to hit the manual reboot switch on the computer.

would I be royally screwed?</STRONG>

Ain't image backup great! :D

[GuruWannabe]

FreeBSD by default uses synchronous file access, so unless you were making changes to a bunch of files at the time, you wouldn't have a problem.

[Bully_Crist]

this is kinda unrelated, but I thought I might ask anyway...

I want to mount a FAT32 partition from within FreeBSD... FreeBSD is located on the second hard drive and on the second partition...the FAT partition I'm looking at is on the first IDE cable and the first hard drive...it is also on the first partition of that hard drive (it takes up all that space). What I want to do is to mount it on startup (of FreeBSD) so that I can view the FAT root from /windows/c/ if possible from...wherever.

anybody know how to do this quickly and cleanly? or should I just RTFM?

[freebsd]

Show us your /etc/fstab, then run the command: disklabel /dev/ad0s1 and disklabel /dev/ad2s1 or disklabel /dev/ad3s1 and show us the output.

For your reference, onboard IDE controller:
Primary 1st channel - ad0s1
Primary 2nd channel - ad1s1
Secondary 1st channel - ad2s1
Secondary 2nd channel - ad3s1

The command to mount FAT filesystem:

mount -t msdos /dev/adxs1y /path/to/this/dir/must/exist/no/symlink

x value from /dev/adxs1y depends on which channel and y value depends on the partition which you should get it from the command disklabel.

[ 24 April 2001: Message edited by: freebsd ]

[S0larfluX]

Originally posted by Bully_Crist:
yea, yea, I know you're supposed to type 'reboot' from root to reboot the system...

Actually, on a multiuser system like UNIX, you shouldn't use 'reboot', but rather 'shutdown -r now' instead.

[pointreyes]

Originally posted by S0larfluX:
<STRONG>Actually, on a multiuser system like UNIX, you shouldn't use 'reboot', but rather 'shutdown -r now' instead.</STRONG>

Why? Different process invoked for shutting down?

[Bully_Crist]

Originally posted by S0larfluX:
<STRONG>Actually, on a multiuser system like UNIX, you shouldn't use 'reboot', but rather 'shutdown -r now' instead.</STRONG>

well, since it's just me using this system for now...

[Craig McPherson]

You know, you can just unplug the reset button from the motherboard.

[S0larfluX]

The reason why you'd want to use 'shutdown' and not 'reboot' with multiple users is to give them time to logoff and shut the system down gracefully. 'Reboot' is more of a 'quick shutdown'; which is fine for a single user system. So, 'shutdown' can be considered 'polite' while 'reboot' is 'rude'.