Okay, thanks Stuart. I have left testdisk running a deep scan and will see if it finds my /var. I know I'll still have to mount the partitions and I don't know if an fsck would be able to fix any damage done by newfs.
I think at this point I'm better off starting again as like others I've done many upgrades. It's probably not worth trying to fix for the sake of getting a few configuration files and settings back and maybe some files I have elsewhere. I would be interested in finding out a way to access my SATA HDD (sd0) with disklabel and other tools on the ramdisk without first running the install or upgrade programs. Regards Ed Gray On Wed, 10 Feb 2021, 8:33 am Stuart Henderson, <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2021-02-09, Ed Gray <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have backups and will probably not have lost anything important but I > > just wondered if anyone had any suggestions as to whether this is fixable > > and what steps to take before I give up and re-install? I followed a > how-to > > I found which suggested using scan_ffs to rebuild my disklabel but it's > > finding some of the volumes and not all of them. > > If you were able to recover /var, check in /var/backups where you will > hopefully find some disklabel.* files. > > scan_ffs does not support FFS2, previously used only for large > filesystems but on newer installations now used for all filesystems. > > >
