Reading HP-UX floppies in Linux
 

Hello everyone:
The subject line states my bottom-line goal. I have been handed a boatload of 3.5" floppies that were formatted and written to using HP-UX version 7.5. Their only HP-UX computer died and can't be resurrected. If I install Linux in a virtual machine, will I be able to attach a USB floppy drive and read these disks?

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Mary

That's a fairly open-ended question. They may have been written to on an HP-UX system, but it could be any number of filesystem types on the disks. Without knowing what type of file system, you'd be shooting in the dark.

Since it's 7.5, it *MIGHT* be vxfs. If you load/have a current distro of Linux, you should be able to run "sudo modprobe vxfs" to load that filesystem support, then from there type in "mount -t vxfs /dev/floppy /your/mount/point", which *MIGHT* work...modify the floppy device name and path accordingly. You could also just try to shove a floppy disk in and try to mount it without any switches/module loading, and see if it works...it may auto-detect the file system and act accordingly. It's ALL speculation without knowing what file system type you have.

Unfortunately I don't know the filesystem type, and the ones who brought these to me inherited the system from someone long gone. I'll try just loading a floppy into the drive first to see if it auto-detects, then move on to your next suggestion if that doesn't work. Is there a particular distro that you know of that has a reputation for playing nicely with a wide range of filesystem types?

Thank you for your help TB0ne.

Well, I'm partial to openSUSE, and I know it has the vxfs support available. But I'm confident most current distros (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.), will also probably have it.

What is supposedly on these floppy disks? If they're supplied from a vendor, the easiest thing might be to just contact them to see if they have the data online or on CD/DVD for download. Might save you a headache.

These are programs written here for one of our grinding machines. Our tooling department makes a lot of different dies and punches on this machine and these are the programs for making them.

Thank you again for all your help.

I'd consider using dd or use rawrite to make images of them if possible before too much playing. Be sure you look at the floppies to be sure they aren't and odd size like 2.88Mb.

A look at the binary file may yield info as to the format and such.

In any case if you had a good clone of the floppy it may be better to have.


The actual attempt of using in linux may be Opensuse or Suse or the Red Hat clones.

That's a very good point, jefro. OP, if you have a dd image of the floppies on your hard drive, you can still mount them using the loopback device, like this:

A quick search reveals the HU-UX manual, and that says that DOS and LIF are the filing systems used:
http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man7/floppy.7.html

If they're LIF, then see
http://www.hpcc.org/datafile/hpil/lif_utils.html
although it's as old as the hills.

Thanks TBOne.

In any attempted way this sort of deal always scares me. Any way you go be careful and consider copies or backups before you loose the data.

If they are valuable, you might even wish to consider a recovery company that has solid proof of skills exactly in this.

Might even have to talk to HP reps.

Interesting read. http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiw...es.cgi?read=24