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mount sco filesystem with linux recover data

From: bv@wjv.com (Bill Vermillion)
Subject: Re: Recovering data on HDD with unknown SCO ver?
References: <9c2fdbd4.0112041231.3863e78f@posting.google.com> 
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 00:14:58 GMT

In article <9c2fdbd4.0112041231.3863e78f@posting.google.com>,
Jonathan Roy <royj@spectrapremium.com> wrote:

>Here is my problem, I need to retrieve data from a system in our
>company that doesn't start anymore. No backups were done, no emergency
>disk and no one knows the system or OS (I believe it is SCO
>openserver), it is like a system dropped from space. The machine is a
>an old P60, 16MB ram with 3 SCSI drives. When it boots I get:

P60 is the very first release of the Pentium chip - that puts this
machine about five years before the first release of Openserver.

The SCO Unix was only about 2 years old at that time, and Xenix was
still viable.  You may even have an old Xenix system installed.
If it's Xenix then its the original S51 file system and in the
newer SCO's you could add support for the Xenix file system.       


>boot not found
>Cannot open
>Stage 1 boot failure: error loading hd(40)/boot

>I guess the kernel is corrupted or something like that.

That's probably the first stage boot loader, well before it tries
to load the kernel.  The drive could be gone.

>I know Linux a
>lot so I built a floppy with tomsrtbt to try to mount the disks, the
>filesystem is not recognized. I moved the SCSI controller to a second
>machine (the P60 has the wonderful RZ1000 IDE controler) running
>redhat 7.2 and tried mounting the drives again.

>Fdisk on the 3 drives gives the following
>/dev/sda4 * 1 130 1044193+ 63 GNU HURD
>/dev/sdb4 * 1 130 1044193+ 63 GNU HURD
>/dev/sdc4 * 1 553 4441941 63 GNU HURD

I think you'd be a lot better off trying to read it with something
more of that era.  Be sure not to use any of the fsck or other
utilities.

>Can someone pinpoint a way to at least be able to verify the HDD
>content and find out about the version (one drive is really loud), or
>a recovery boot so I can try to restart the system. Which filesystem
>type could be on the system's HDD (now I love ext2). Which linux
>filesystem (mount -t /dev/sda4 /mnt) type can I try.

If you can perform a dd on the Linux system you may be able to
figure out what is there.

>And my worst nightmare would be that the system supports raid, the
>SCSI controller is a 2940 (I don't think it does).

A 2940 on an old P60 indicates to me that the controller was
changed at one time or another.  Again - from memory - but I
don't think the 2940 was out when the P60 was introduced.

Just be carefull.  If you really need the data you may have to go
to someone like Ontrack - they can recover almost anything - even
if they have to take the drive apart to do. Not cheap however.

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