On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:31:33PM +0000, Larry O'Neill (H.S.A.) wrote:
> Hi.
> I have a disk from an Alpha server that I need to get data from... The
> Alpha server no longer boots, and I dont have the time right now to
> diagnose the problem. So I took the disk and lashed it into a Sun Ultra60,
> which is also running OpenBSD. My problem is that I cant remember all of
> the details of the partitioning that the disk had... So in terms of
> getting access to the data, how do I find out what to put into disklabel
> for it? Unfortunately due to other complications, I currently dont have
> fdisk on the machine.
>
> (only 2 slots for Ultra2 SCSI Wide, one was root disk, other was /usr.
> Copied as much stuff onto the root disk that space would alow, so that I
> could remove the origional /usr disk and put in the one I need the data
> from. This caused some stuff not to work because not all of it could be
> copied over)
As Theo pointed out, this is rather difficult (though I had no idea it
was *that* difficult, honestly).
A low-level disk recovery is possible, but extremely painful. I have no
idea if such recovery-kits as The Corononer's Toolkit and the Sleuthkit
(newer than TCT) work on Alpha disks (they do claim to work on OpenBSD),
but if they do, they might be a good bet, changing low-level recovery
from 'extremely painful' to something more like 'very painful'.
Be aware that they are both meant to gather information from a system
after it's been broken into, more than recover a complete filesystem
from scratch, which is one of the reasons for the 'very painful'.
Notably, they seem to deal mainly in deleted inodes, rather than
allocated ones, and I am not at all certain they can even be made to
work with allocated nodes.
If you can get the Alpha to come up even a bit, you could write a bunch
of NULLs and a large tar file directly to disk, which would be much
easier to recover (the NULLs are optional, but make it easier to see
where the data starts; directly means bypassing the filesystem, which
might scatter stuff all over the place). However, I gather that's not an
option, and if you can get the Alpha up that far you could probably just
nc the whole thing.
If the data is not too private, you might want to check if there is a
fellow Alpha owner near - that would, by far, be the easiest solution.
Of course, you can always try hacking the kernel to read Alpha disks,
but that is likely to be far from trivial.
Joachim
