Re: SCSI disk from an Alpha box, in a Sparc
On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:31:33PM +, 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
Re: SCSI disk from an Alpha box, in a Sparc
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:44:50 +0100 Joachim Schipper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:31:33PM +, 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). Just because the label is built just for a particular arch imho you still can use dd and the raw device . ~~ http://www.chatou-informatic.com Maintenance, infogerance, interventions sur site, telemaintenance
Re: SCSI disk from an Alpha box, in a Sparc
Joachim Schipper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:31:33PM +, 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. The big task is really endianess, look at NetBSD's 'option FFS_EI'. The easiest solution should be just slapping the drive into a stray i386 box. martin
Re: SCSI disk from an Alpha box, in a Sparc
Hi, Thanks for your replies. I have started a dd from the disk to a volume mounted over nfs from an i386 box. My hope is that from there I will eventually be able to sort out getting the data from it. Right now I need to return the disk itself and the Alpha it came in back to where it came from. Another approach I had been considering was booting the alpha from an openbsd install disk for Alpha (if such a thing exists - I didnt install the Alpha), mounting the hard drive from there, and getting the data from it that way... assuming the machine can actually boot from the cdrom. The OpenBSD CDs I have have i386, amd, sparc, etc... but not alpha... Is there a place I can get a CD that has complete install components for Alpha??? Larry On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Martin Reindl wrote: Joachim Schipper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:31:33PM +, 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. The big task is really endianess, look at NetBSD's 'option FFS_EI'. The easiest solution should be just slapping the drive into a stray i386 box. martin
Re: SCSI disk from an Alpha box, in a Sparc
Larry O'Neill (H.S.A.) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Thanks for your replies. I have started a dd from the disk to a volume mounted over nfs from an i386 box. My hope is that from there I will eventually be able to sort out getting the data from it. Right now I need to return the disk itself and the Alpha it came in back to where it came from. Another approach I had been considering was booting the alpha from an openbsd install disk for Alpha (if such a thing exists - I didnt install the Alpha), mounting the hard drive from there, and getting the data from it that way... assuming the machine can actually boot from the cdrom. The OpenBSD CDs I have have i386, amd, sparc, etc... but not alpha... Is there a place I can get a CD that has complete install components for Alpha??? See bottom of www.openbsd.org/alpha.html. Larry On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Martin Reindl wrote: Joachim Schipper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:31:33PM +, 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. The big task is really endianess, look at NetBSD's 'option FFS_EI'. The easiest solution should be just slapping the drive into a stray i386 box. martin
Re: SCSI disk from an Alpha box, in a Sparc
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? It is way more complicated than that. The disklabel is at a different place, the filesystems are a different byte order, and there are other issues. You are trying to do something very hard.
