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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?"
exactly, 10mb at 9600bps will take only 2-3 hours.
Xenix used their "sco xenix" filesystem. The Xenix filesystem is supported under the mount utility in modern 2.6 linux kernels
by Anonymous Coward
What a great machine. The Altos 586 was the first machine I used to run my BBS (which has run nonstop since 1988 and is still online today) before SCO Xenix and later Linux arrived on the scene. It was an insanely cool computer.
Anyway, even if there were an operating system available today that is still capable of parsing the Xenix filesystem, you wouldn't be able to get to it because the disk is attached to the system I/O board using an ST506 controller. Good luck finding a modern computer with one of those in it.
You're going to have to move that data off the machine the way we did it back in the days when an Altos was a modern computer. Plug a null modem cable into that serial port and use UUCP to get the data moved. Or if the machine has rzsz installed, you might be able to get away with using Zmodem instead.
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Actually, the floppy drive has a higher probability of working than the hard drive, although it will need some cleaning :)
The floppies can be anything... hard sector, soft sector... You'll have to verify it (xref the floppy mfg number to the manuals).
Given patience, you may even make hard sector floppies from old softsector ones.
The hard drive however is NOT an IDE drive. IDE wasn't designed until 1986, and wasn't widely marketed until a year or two later. The drive is either an MFM or RLL drive. Fifteen years ago you might have found an abundance of controllers that could handle these drives, but you'd still be hard pressed reading the data.
I recommend that you get the Altos up and running, and transfer via the serial port to another machine. You should be able to get 9600 baud, and with any luck (although I'd doubt it) you might be able to push it to 19200.
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If the information was in a "public" forum, one visible with the access level generally granted to members of the general public, it's probably considered a "publication."
If they were "published" prior to March 1, 1989 but not registered with the copyright office AND not marked (c) they might be in the public domain. See a lawyer.
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Setting up UUCP on Xenix
Setting up UUCP on Linux
If you really want to try to read the disk it is probably UFS which you can read from Linux.
Hope this helps.
Ah, the Altos systems. 8800 series, then 486, then 586. They used up numbers years before Intel got to them (the Altos 486 had an Intel 80186 in it, and 4 serial ports). Often paired with Wyse terminals. Anybody else remember "business basic"?
It's almost certainly an ST506 drive; you will be very hard pressed to connect it to a PCI era system; probably can only get as far as AT bus machine.
In any case, if you do manage to image the drive, the filesystem will be based on either Unix version 7, Unix System V, or the Berkeley Fast File System. It wasn't until Linux rolled along that we started to seriously fork into lots of file system variants. It's most likely the basic System V file system, which is well documented, and pretty simple stuff.
The posters above are correct, however. You really should try the serial port approach first. I'd go for cu over uucp - getting uucp running can be quite an exercise in itself. And you'll want either tar or cpio; probably tar, but watchout for version and format incompatibilities there as well.
You can also just cat the data out a serial port, and capture it as a session log on the other end. That's likely to be the easiest solution, and perhaps more reliable than any other.
You haven't said what the nature of the data is, but after this much time laying dormant, you are likely to have substantial challenges at the application level interpreting the data as well.
You can use tar and serial ports.
Once you get the systems connected via serial, you can do something like this on the Xenix box:
tar cf /dev/serialdevice0 /home (or whatever directory you want to move)
then on the Linux box on the other end:
tar xpf /dev/ttyS0
will unpack the data. Tar hasn't changed much in decades, and works very well through pipes like this. Good luck. :)
IMHO you should use the serial port to move whatever data you want moved. Your chances of success with other methods are low.
Fairly recent Xenix binaries of Kermit exist: http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ck80binaries.html#sco
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Geepers, people...a non-Compaq 8086 system from that era would almost certainly have an ST-506 interface hard drive, not IDE! Those old hard drives were built like tanks, and tend to keep their data. If you can't get the system running, you can probably dig up some old 286 system, or even a *Pentium* system, and plug an 8 or 16 ST506 hard drive card, like the old Western Digital W8006, and access the data that way. A ST-506 drive will have three cables connecting it...one for power, one (the fat ribbon cable) for control, and the last one (skinny ribbon cable) for data. JUST MAKE SURE THAT THE PIN 1s LINED UP OTHERWISE YOU CAN BLOW THE DRIVE, CONTROLLER, AND MAYBE EVEN THE COMPUTER. If the cable is not "keyed", that is, has a vertical piece of plastic to make sure pin 1 connects to pin 1 on the edge connector, you have to figure out which is pin 1 on the cable...If it is a grey cable with a red strip on one side, that is pin 1, which should connect to the edge connector side that has the notch in it. If you have a braided, multi-color cable...sorry, you will have to figure it out yourself.
Of course, if you really want to be paranoid, and have the money, contact an old hard drive recovery company like On-Track, and they should be able to hoover all of the data off for you, and give it to you in an easy to read format.
ttyl
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A 16550 in the early 1980s? I'm sorry, but I think not.
I wrote a lot of serial comms drivers back in those days, and I don't think I even /heard/ of a 16550 until the very late 80s. First one I actually met was probably in my brand new 486DX33 box I got in 1992, although to be honest I don't remember for sure. I didn't code for one until about 1994, and that was on an embedded system, as you still couldn't guarantee that all PCs would have them rather than 16450s or even 8250s.
Also bear in mind that the original 16550s were broken so you couldn't use the FIFO feature (which was the whole point of the thing) properly; that wasn't fixed until the 16550A came along.
exactly, 10mb at 9600bps will take only 2-3 hours.
Yep, and since your computer is a 586, there's a good chance the serial port will do 192kbps which even faster still. If you want to transfer binary files, I'd suggest using the zmodem protocol. Since your Xenix system was running a BBS, it almost certainly has software installed that will do zmodem file transfers.
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