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Reading AIX drive. Yes, AIX. Ancient. Dinosaur. Old fart.
gryhnd:
Local biz called me to try and fix a problem with their ancient PC. They thought it was DOS based. Turns out is an old IBM AIX PS/2 sporting a high horsepower 486/33, 8 MEG of RAM, and a 260MEG HD. Probably about 18yrs old.
See the attached. It appears to my untrained eye to be a disk full/file system full type of error. Problem is I cannot even get it to boot to a fail safe command line so I can root out the cruft. It just sits there after 2 "no inode" messages. An internal hardware based series of IBM tests seems to not report any issues with the drive itself, thankfully.
My old Win2K Server is a dual PIII650 coppermine PC running SCSI drives. I transplanted the old IBM drive into it and fired up Ubuntu Live CD.
Ubuntu can see the drive, sees the small DOS partition, but can't ID the main AIX file system so I can't access it.
I presume I might be able to build some special kernel with AIX support in it, but that's more work than I am looking forward too.
So...any "quick and dirty" ways I can access this? If not, I've never built a custom kernel so any tips would be appreciated...and also trying to keep it in the "live cd" format.
Thanks
NiN^_^NiN:
I've never delt with AIX so i doubt i will be much help but can you run any commands?
Can you run the command df -hi this will list all the inodes in use
Looks like if you can access the commandline that the command fsck should check the filesystem and fix any issues.
But from quickly reading the issue is the default amount of inodes has been reached even tho there is free space the inodes is used for the directory listing.
Other than above i really can't help but it's cool to see old tech still being used ;D
gryhnd:
--- Quote from: NiN^_^NiN on October 06, 2010, 05:58:21 pm ---I've never delt with AIX so i doubt i will be much help but can you run any commands?
--- End quote ---
No, I can't (see above, Para 2, sentance 3). That's why I think I need to do some deletions with the drive in another computer.
Thanks though!
boykster:
not looking that promising
http://serverfault.com/questions/104992/is-it-possible-and-how-to-mount-an-aix-disk-into-linux
SavannahLion:
I may be wrong since I have minimal experience with AIX and I'm not actually looking at the hardware itself.
Since you were able to mount it in Linux (but not "read" the files) on a newer PC, the next step I would take is to take a dump of the harddrive itself and preserve the data within. Linux has several utilities which create different types of dumps for what you're trying to do. I would imagine dd would do the trick.
Once you have an image handy, you can make duplicates and manipulate, mount, whatever to your hearts content. With such a small drive, you can store more than one copy on a CD and beat the ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- out of it without having to risk damaging the drive or the data.
At this point, based on your description, I see only three options.
Compile a Linux kernel with support. Though that doesn't seem very promising.
Purchase a functioning AIX system off of eBay or some place and attach the drive to that.
Hope that someone out there created some sort of hardware interface so you can use the mounted image in a new drive on the old PC. Similar to SIO2PC or the CF to IDE adapters. I dunno. I'm sure there's something like that out there.
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