[rescue] reading old unix disks from Linux

[Clem Cole]

I've long ago forgotten how to deal with it, but we did have a solution
back-in-the-day (maybe it was a Sun private a switch on the mount); but I
know were read SPARC disks on an x86 at Locus Computing when Sun was our
customer and we were doing OS development for them under contract.  Google
is your friend, I suspect a little hunting you will find how it was done.
a'

On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 1:05 PM Mike Spooner <mikes at aalin.co.uk> wrote:

> Warning about reading Solaris/SPARC UFS filesystems using Solaris/x86:
> some of
> the metadata is stored on-disk in host byte-order (I know, stupid of Sun
> to do
> that, but there you go).
>
>
>
>
> Real SPARC h/w or an emulator thereof may be needed to read Solaris/SPARC
> filesystems.
>
>
>
>
> -- Mike
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 7:57 PM +0100, "John Francini" <francini at mac.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> VAX Ultrix should be able to run on the SIMH emulator, and it should be
> able
> to mount the disks from the DECstation (which also ran Ultrix).
>
> john
>
> b
> John Francini
> b I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace;
> that two are called a law firm; and that three or more become a Congress.
> And by God I have had *this Congress!b  b  John Adams
>
> > On 26 Apr 2019, at 13:24 , Clem cole  wrote:
> >
> > Simh and the like are your friends.    I would only use Linux, MacOS or
> any
> > other Unix to grab the entire disk image as a raw byte stream.    Then
> run
> an
> > emulated system such as a simh instance of the native machine that
> created
> it.
> > In the case of solaris you ran run Solaris x86 to mount the sparc images.
> > Similar AIX PS/2 (386) can read the 370 and romp based disk images.
> HPUX
> > might be more difficult but you might ask the HP folks in the simh world
> -
> > they have a MPE running but I donb t know about the other OS.
> >
> > Tru64 can be read on FreeAXP if you donb t gave access to real hw.  I
> will
> > say I have moved scsi disks between my FreeBSD/OpenBSD system and my
> Alpha
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
> quite.
> >
> >> On Apr 26, 2019, at 9:11 AM, Doug McIntyre  wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 05:46:57AM -0400, Andrew K. Bressen wrote:
> >>> I have old SCSI drives I'm trying to read, and I'm running into a
> number
> >>> of different issues I'd welcome feedback on.
> >>>
> >>> I've got drives from PCs, Macs, Suns, and DEC machines, and I'm using a
> >>> 32 bit linux box (3.x kernel) to read them all. One thing I'm
> >>> wondering is if I'd have fewer problems booting off a FreeBSD or NetBSD
> >>> liveCD.
> >>
> >> Honestly, I'd try to get images of those drives read into some virtual
> >> format, and run emulators of each of the systems you are trying to
> >> read from. Even a PC version of Solaris would probably do much better
> >> reading a SPARC solaris disk than any other OS.
> >>
> >> UFS is not implemented the same. Disk partitioning never was the same.
> >> Sun did way different than DEC, which was different than AIX, which
> >> was different than HPUX, even if they all used UFS. None of them
> >> partitioned the basic disks the same.
> >>
> >>> In a few cases, I've mounted partitions and seen only a lost+found
> >>> directory that's empty. And dated sometime in the 1990s. But if I
> >>> run strings(1) on the dd files of the raw partitions, I see tons
> >>> of stuff there. So, am I seeing the remains of deleted files, or
> >>> is the UFS driver buggy or having a poor interaction with the kernel's
> >>> determination of partitions? Is there an undelete tool for antique UFS?
> >>
> >> I'd think that if you did get it to mount to a point where you could
> >> see /lost+found that you found a combination of the proper settings to
> >> really read the disk, and most likely the files were "erased", which
> just
> >> means that the directory node entry was removed, and the datablocks
> >> put in the available pool (just like any OS does), while leaving
> >> the contents of the file still in all its old disk blocks for you to
> read.
> >>
> >> BSD systems come with 'fsdb' to repair UFS file systems, but it requires
> >> a knowledge of the way UFS works, and lots of manual fiddling.
> >> I don't know of any general purpose undelete tools, although I'm sure
> >> people have proprietary inhouse solutions somewhere (ie.
> FBI/NSA/Ontrack)
> >> _______________________________________________
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