News Group Posts

sco filesystems and linux

From: brian@aljex.com (Brian K. White)
Subject: Re: Accessing second Hard disk with SCO Data in Linux
Date: 3 Nov 2003 06:04:24 -0800
References: <33f6d97e.0311022158.34cb465f@posting.google.com> 

gcl@vsnl.com (P.Venugopal) wrote in message news:<33f6d97e.0311022158.34cb465f@posting.google.com>...
> I have a linux 9.0 server.I connected a SCSI HDD from my earlier SCO
> Openserver system to this system as a second hard disk.The original
> disk on linux is with 68 pin cable and the SCO disk is with 50
> pins.The second hard disk is not visible.I used MAKEDEV to create a
> sdb node in dev directory and tried mounting this dev on mnt to check
> access to the second hard disk but ls command returns an error saying
> this is not a block device.
> The SCO HDD has only one partition with user data.What is the correct
> method to access it in linux?
> regards
> Venu

what do you mean one partition?

is it one fdisk partition where you made the fs yourself manually
using mkfs after aborting out of mkdev hd only letting mkdev hd run
long enough to create the /dev nodes for you?

or is it one fs on the whole raw drive where you ran mkfs yourself on
the whole-drive device (like you would do on a floppy)

or is it the far more likely case where the filesystem was created by
running mkdev hd all the way through? In this last case, you cannot
(easily) read that filesystem under linux beause linux does not know
how to read divvy partitions (up to 7 sub-partitions within a single
fdisk primary partition)

If you happen to have some more raw unassigned disk space, you *might*
be able to figure out where the fs actually starts & stops and use dd
to extract it to another empty raw fdisk primary partition. I've never
done that but it sound plausible :)

The ways to get sco data to linux is:
 1) boot sco and use networking
or
 2) boot sco and write a cpio or tar to a tape or to a raw whole disk
or whole primary fdisk partition
or
 3) boot sco and install a extra hd and and only run mkdev hd up to
the point where on the second invocation it runs fdisk. in fdisk, make
note of the whole disk device (/dev/sdsk/2s0 etc...) and create a
primary fdisk partition, then quit out of divvy without writing and
divvy table, then run mkfs on the new whole-disk or whole partition
device, mount the new filesystem and copy data to it. then you can
read that data in linux. oh, and I've personally only ever sucessfully
read a _xenix_ filesystem under linux this way. i've done it a few
times, including using osr5 to create the xenix fs by specifying an
option to mkfs, but xenix fs is not a very complete unix fs (short
filenames, no symlinks, maybe other limitations). This question has
been raised lots of times, but no one has ever come back and said that
they tried to do this with HTFS (osr5 default filesystem) and the need
hasn't come up for myself (I find options 1 and 2 a lot more
practical, faster, easier, simpler)
Presumably another fs type that sco can write that linux can read is
iso9660 (cd rom filesystem), and of course, you could also create a
fat32 filesystem in windows or linux and sco could write to it and
then linux could read it.

And when dealing with fdisk partitions, be aware that sco fdisk
numbers them exactly backwards from the way dos & linux do. If you
create a primary fdisk partition #2 in dos or linux, that partition is
#3 in sco's fdisk. Not being aware of that or not being observant
enough to spot it when it happens, is a good way to blast away a
partition full of an os when you thought you were going to write to an
empty partition in the other os.

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