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Accessing BSDi Diskslices On Non-BSD OSes?

Posted by Cliff on from the disk-literacy-everywhere dept.

The Madpostal Worker asks: "My school has an old BSDi 3.0 machine that is slowly going downhill. Now ideally we would like to replace it with a Linux or FreeBSD machine, but I have yet to find a way to read the BSDi disk slices from any other operating system. Has anyone done this before? We are short on hardware, and have quite a bit of data, so a simple copy is out of the question. We really just want to be able to mount the drives from a free operating system. Looking around online has been unhelpful, BSDi 3.0 is old enough there is little support. Anything would help, if only even what scheme BSDi uses for diskslices."

4 of 8 comments (clear)

  1. I know that it is a lot of data. by funkman · · Score: 2
    But isn't there a backup somewhere that can be restored to the Linux device? If you are not doing backups, then the data can't be that important.

    If the data is important enough, then buying a couple cheap 60GB drives would be worth it.

  2. A slightly Offtopic Post regarding Amiga ADF by King+of+the+World · · Score: 2
    Is there any way to read old amiga disks into PCs? What i'd like is to read these from a normal floppy drive then convert to .ADF. You know how people make jokes about wallpapering the house with them, I've done that, but the colour scheme isn't pleasing.

    Any ideas?

    --
    --Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
  3. I had the same problem. by shippo · · Score: 2
    I had some data I needed to pull off the non-root disk of a long since unsupported OS. Being able to move the data to another filesystem would be useful - this system didn't have any real backup utilities, other than a broken implemenation of tar and the proprietary, undocumented format used for the OS's own backup system. It would have helped in porting, instead of transferring all contents via a network, which at that stage was only 10Mbit.

    The filesystem was supposedly based upon the SysV filesystem. The SysV filesystem in the then current Linux kernel didn't mount the drive. Further investigation revealed that an earlier version of the OS did use SysV, and that the current system could mount SysV disks if needed. The problem was a limitation of 64K Inodes per filesystem. I may have needed to do some kernel hacking to the SysV filesystem driver to get it to recognise the partition.

    My plan was to install the original OS, format a disk, and then install it under the recent version, transfer the data via mv to the newly formatted disk, and then read this under Linux.

    Unfortunatly I couldn't find a platform that would install the original OS, and sent the disk to a data recovery company instead.

  4. Re:Mounting BSDi disk slices under FreeBSD by Cato · · Score: 2

    Somebody moderate up the message I'm commenting to, it actually has a solution...