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Reading AIX drive. Yes, AIX. Ancient. Dinosaur. Old fart.
lilshawn:
--- Quote ---Purchase a functioning AIX system off of eBay or some place and attach the drive to that.
--- End quote ---
i was going to suggest that, to use another functioning system to access the partition.
depending on how badly the info is needed (which i think isn't that bad since it's being left in the hands of a 20 year old computer) you may just have to throw your hands up and admit defeat.
SavannahLion:
--- Quote from: lilshawn on October 06, 2010, 11:29:25 pm ---depending on how badly the info is needed (which i think isn't that bad since it's being left in the hands of a 20 year old computer)
--- End quote ---
It shouldn't surprise you at what kind of hardware people have running. It's not uncommon for companies to hang millions off of twenty+ year old machines.
newmanfamilyvlogs:
Passed this thread on to a friend who's worked with older AIX systems some and he had a few suggestions/observations:
(8:00:23 AM) K--------s: on the original system he ought to try and set the date to something pre 2000 in the bios
(8:00:36 AM) K--------s: as for reading it in another system, he's likely SOL
(8:00:55 AM) K--------s: aix had their own filesystem before they moved to sysV unix
(8:01:02 AM) K--------s: and even then it's their own JFS
(8:01:36 AM) K--------s: the one that's on linux won't read a real AIX one unless it was formatted in compatibility mode
(8:02:00 AM) K--------s: what he might try doing is force mounting it, but i don't even know where to start for the partition formatting
(8:02:00 AM) K--------s: it's not jfs, this is too old for that
(8:02:14 AM) K--------s: the root filesystem might actually be ffs, the unix fast file system
(8:02:20 AM) K--------s: try:
(8:02:29 AM) K--------s: mount -t ffs /dev/sdwhatever /mnt
(8:02:36 AM) K--------s: specifying the fs type
(8:02:55 AM) K--------s: but it's also likely got a unix disklabel on it
(8:03:10 AM) K--------s: and i don't know if ubuntu will understand the disklabel or ffs without help
(8:03:23 AM) K--------s: maybe a freebsd livecd
(8:03:28 AM) K--------s: that's where i'd start
...
(8:06:12 AM) K--------s: but, summary:
(8:06:25 AM) K--------s: filesystems are likely unix FFS or ibm's JFS
(8:06:47 AM) K--------s: depending on the age of the JFS, it might not be possible to mount it as such
(8:07:21 AM) K--------s: mount -t ffs /dev/sda1b /mnt
(8:07:37 AM) K--------s: depends on what kind of disklabel is on the disk
(8:08:29 AM) K--------s: (dos disklabels allow for four partitions, with the option of making one into an extended partition for another 15 or so. unix disklabels let you specify sixteen partitions off the bat, with the option to allow them to overlap each other)
gryhnd:
Thanks everyone. I'd warned the customer they may well be S.O.L. on this. I'll have to let them know that any further attempts at recovery are likely to cost them lotsa $$ in labor, and could yield nothing in the end.
Appreciate the help.
Samstag:
The AIX systems I work on can be booted in a maintenance mode that you may be able to use to clean/repair the disk, but all my documentation is for machines that are more like 10-15 years old and run on risc processors.
Do you have a switch or keyswitch where one of the positions is a wrench icon? If so, boot in the wrench position. If you don't have a physical switch, there may be an window of time before the operating system starts to boot where you can request maintenance mode by pressing either F5, control-F5, or control-5. If that works you'll get a maintenance console, but the commands you have access to aren't necessarily unix commands and they seem to vary from version to version. I think my oldest system is running AIX 3.2 so I don't know if the info I have will be relevant.
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