Need Help Salvaging Data From an Old Xenix System

Milo_Mindbender writes "I've recently gotten ahold of an old Altos 586 Xenix system (a late '80s Microsoft flavor of Unix) that has one of the first multi-user BBS systems in the US on it, and I want to salvage the historical BBS posts off it. I'm wondering if anyone remembers what format Xenix used on the 10MB (yes MB) IDE hard drive and if it can still be read on a modern Linux system. This system is quite old, has no removable media or ethernet and just barely works. The only other way to get data off is a slow serial port. I've got a controller that should work with the disk, but don't want to tear this old machine apart without some hope that it will work. Anyone know?"

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[Phat_Tony]

Now that this is an "Ask Slashdot," I'm sure someone (who probably helped develop Xenix or something) will give you an exact answer. But in general, "what file system does Xenix use and will it interoperate with Linux/anything modern" is not a difficult sort of question to research, if you're willing to go beyond a Google search. Amazon has plenty of used Xenix books for cheap, and at least the Dallas and Cleveland (and based on that sample, I'm guessing most large city public) libraries have at least a title or two. Even Ebay has a Xenix manual up for sale.They should tell you whatever you need to know about Xenix, and then you can Google about support for it in modern OS's. .

In fact, you may even be able to just Google it. No need to bother a million Slashdot readers.