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Need Help Salvaging Data From an Old Xenix System

Posted by timothy on from the warrior-princess dept.

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?"

5 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'd do it the slow but secure way. by jgardia · · Score: 5, Informative

    exactly, 10mb at 9600bps will take only 2-3 hours.

  2. yeah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Xenix used their "sco xenix" filesystem. The Xenix filesystem is supported under the mount utility in modern 2.6 linux kernels
    by Anonymous Coward

  3. Altos 586 by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  4. UUCP info you need by Kjellander · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:I'd do it the slow but secure way. by Ambient+Sheep · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.