[SunHELP] Changing hard drives SunOS 4.1.1 Sun4c

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: Brad Walker <bwalker at musings.com>
" 
" SunOS 4.1.1 only support 32 bit filesystems. Therefore your partition sizes
" can't exceed 4GB in size.

2G, in sunos4.  i suspect signed arithmetic.

" I would partition this into a 3GB root, 512MB
" swap, 1 GB /usr, and 3.5 GB /opt. Or something like this.

there's not much you can do with root in sunos4; i wouldn't waste that
much on it, and afaik /opt was a sVr4 / solaris2 invention.  i'd make
/var separate.

i don't recall if home dirs were under /home or /export as in
solaris2, but that's the places i'd put big slices.

but for this job fred would probably be satisfied just cloning his
original fs layout, if not the exact sizes.

" Then then "dump | restore xfi -" from the old disk to the new one should
" make it work.

that's the fastest copy i know of short of dd, which is geometry
dependent.  remember to partition and format the target disk first...

" But, your problem boils down to a the 32 bit filesystem limit.

yup, 2G slices, and no more than 8 of them on a disk, unless you have
disksuite 1.  any se disk should work, and most lvd can fall back to
se, though you'll have to feed the geometry to format if it you can't
match it to one of the disks sun used, or use john dimarco's master
format.dat
ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/sunmanagers/format.dat
or scsiinfo
ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/scsiinfo/

" On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Fredric QJ Bleholtz <e5frog at gmail.com>wrote:
" 
" > So, have this Sun Sparcstation 2, the frambuffer broke, bought a
" > replacement, the PSU broke, bought a replacement, the external drive
" > started acting up, took a backup copy with a clone tool on a PC, internal
" > drive started going wacky as well, had to turn it on it's side to make it
" > work... have swapped the NVRAM as well, hacked with an external battery.
" >
" > So, soon there are no original parts left.
" >
" > I used the EaseUs hard drive clone tool from a Ultimate Boot CD, got an old
" > 2.25GB drive and successfully made a copy that it booted from. Got the
" > panic copy of the external drive with the same program, only option at the
" > time was an SD-card in a SCSI-card reader and pointing a fan to the
" > external hard drive (5.25" huge monster) at a pair of circuits going hot.
" >
" > Disks in that size isn't very easy to come buy at reasonable price so when
" > a friend offered a 9GB hard drive with a 68 pin connector and a 50 pin
" > adapter I tried it out. Copying from the original giant sized drive didn't
" > want to work again so I ran the EaseUs program from the UBCD 5.1.1 with the
" > SD-card instead. Went fine, no errors.
" >
" > After hooking it to the Sparcstation 2 it wasn't accepted, complained about
" > the header - seems it wasn't what it was supposed to be, found some tip
" > about replacing a missing header and checked the format command but got
" > stuck when it asked for cylinders etc, couldn't find any proper information
" > about that and I haven't dealt with it since I added hard drives to my
" > Amiga in the early 90's.
" >
" > So I quit, took a look at the drive in WinHex with the drive hooked to a
" > SCSI-card in the PC. The header was emptied out, the previous "SUN1.3G cyl
" > 1965 alt 2 hd 17 sec 80 etc etc" wasn't there any more, possibly the format
" > command erases that even before you have entered any information?
" >
" > The 9GB drive seem to have been found but is there any idea to keep trying
" > with that, is it likely it will work?
" > How come the 2.25GB drive worked with a binary copy, the header (at least
" > was) "SUN1.05 cyl 2036 alt 2 hd 14 sec 72" and wasn't correct either. I
" > assumed it used the drive like it had that geometry and simply didn't care
" > about the rest of the hard drive.
" >
" > I have filled the 9GB drive with $FF and will attempt to write the binary
" > data back again, hope it will make a difference.
" >
" > I'm not interested in updating stuff, installing other OS or similar, want
" > to keep the same data, just swap to functional drives. I only keep this
" > computer around so I can access that one program I need old data from from
" > time to time.
" >
" >
" > I have the data that's going to be on the drive (I assume it's correct as
" > it was copied with no errors), just need a compatible drive or the correct
" > procedure to put it there.
" > Any sane advice about this would be most helpful, these hard drives don't
" > hold on forever.
" >
" > / Fredric the newcomer.
" > --
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought