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 

[gryhnd]

I've never delt with AIX so i doubt i will be much help but can you run any commands?

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.

[lilshawn]

Purchase a functioning AIX system off of eBay or some place and attach the drive to that.

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]

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)

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.

[MonMotha]

I would recommend that if you do attempt to forcibly mount the filesystem that you 1) make sure you have a backup image (duh), and 2) mount the filesystem readonly.  On linux, add "-o ro" to the mount command line.  This will tell the OS not to attempt any writes that could cause problems during the recovery process.

As for actually reading an ancient AIX filesystem, I'm not sure I can help you much.  If Linux and FreeBSD can't read it, you'll probably have to come up with either a dedicated user-mode tool or an ancient AIX system.