Recovery for Old SCO Open Server RAID SCSI Drive

Noran Rad · 08-06-2008, 04:52 AM

A friend has entrusted me with a device of his, an ancient SCSI RAID thing which with 2 x 9.1 GB drives. He has some .d files on it that he wants to recover as the machine that he originally had connected to, a 500 Mhz Compaq with SCO Open Server, will no longer boot on it. (that, and I don't know the commands to boot it anyway...

)

So I connected it up to a Linux box of mine and with the little info I knew of recovery I tried to mount it to no avail.

I tried

mount -t ufs -o ufstype=old -o ro /dev/sdb4 /media/diskCom
and
mount -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd -o ro /dev/sdb4 /media/diskCom

but it says

Code:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb4,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

when I "dmesg | tail" I get

Code:

ufs_read_super: bad magic number

I gave up trying to mount it after a while as I'm not even sure which filing system it is... (Yeah, I know that sounds silly) it may not be UFS. When I "fdisk -l" it to try and find out I get

Code:

Disk /dev/sdb: 1106 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdb2          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdb3          0+      4       5-     40131   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sdb4   *      5    1100-   1096-   8795619   63  GNU HURD or SysV

GNU HURD or Sysv?

So I tried "mount -t sysv -o ro /dev/sdb4 /media/diskCom" and "mount -t sysv /dev/sdb4 /media/diskCom" to get

Code:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb4,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

"dmesg | tail" gives me

Code:

VFS: unable to find oldfs superblock on device sdb4

I get the idea that Linux probably doesn't like me very much as all my diagnostics end up like this, but then I figured "A bad workman always blames his tools" so what better than to ask the better workmen than myself.

I greatly appreciate any help in advance.

Thanks

stress_junkie · 08-06-2008, 08:52 AM

The reference to sysv means UNIX System V. One compliant OS still available is Sun OpenSolaris. Try installing that and then try to mount the SCO file system on that. You could still have problems because we don't know if SCO RAID has any resemblance to Sun Solaris RAID. I know when I administered Solaris machines Sun had a lot of add ons for volume management and other features that we take for granted in Linux. Still I would definitely try the OpenSolaris route.

Noran Rad · 08-06-2008, 10:42 AM

Oh...

Thanks!

Although, I just downloaded FreeBSD in an attempt to mount it on that, is that a good idea? I did some research first, but in essence I'm taking shots in the dark here.