[nycbug-talk] Rescuing an OpenBSD 3.0 System

[Jonathan Vanasco]

We had a power flicker last week that seemed to have knocked out one  
of our UPS regulators and everything on it.

I thought everything was moved over and happy on a new regulator  
until i walked into the office this morning -- our firewall was in a  
constant reboot cycle.

It's an eracks.com box w/ a ecs p6stmt rev 1.0 motherboard, running  
openbsd 3.0

It does one of two things:
   boots about 20seconds into openbsd, then reboots
   boots about 5 seconds into bios, then reboots

I tried booting off a cd.  if it doesn't reboot automagically, it  
does when i issue a command on the shell.

I swapped in the one bar of like memory i could find -- no luck

I plugged/unplugged every card in the box -- no luck

I'm guessing the bios got screwed by a power surge (although that  
doesn't explain why it started rebooting overnight - it was fine last  
night)

I'm at a loss of what to do - i tried tossing the drives into the  
other boxes i have in the office, but then i get
     ===
     Using Drive: 0 Partition: 3
     reading boot...
     Bad magic
     ===
Which google says is something that I really don't want to see.

barring a miracle, i need to get a new firewall

the downed machine has all of the local networking stuff -- firewall,  
lan, proxy stuff -- which i need to get off -- we never backed it up,  
and there's too much to rewrite

does anyone have a suggestion to make my week less of a nightmare?