xenix (sysv) filesystem and FreeBSD

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Thu Sep 10 08:40:45 UTC 2015


On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 12:42:10 +0430, Mohsen Pahlevanzadeh wrote:
> I have a hdd (scsi), about 1985. I can detect hdd and geometry, But 
> maybe linux kernel removed xenix (sysv) filesytem.
> Question is , 1. Can i detect it via freebsd?

You should at least _try_ it. Depending on the partitioning,
and if I remember correctly, Xenix uses some strange SCI HTFS
and maybe UFS (not entirely sure), and the partitioning is
either some MBR or "dedicated" schema, then, if everything
else works, you should see:

	/dev/da0
	/dev/da0s1	<- a slice
	/dev/da0s1a	<- a partition
	/dev/da0s1d
	/dev/da0s1e
	and so on,

or maybe even

	/dev/da0
	/dev/da0a	<- a partition without a slice
	/dev/da0d
	/dev/da0e
	and so on,

if, let's say, da0 corresponds to the SCSI disk.

Use the command

	# fdisk da0

to find out which partitioning schema (if any) has been used,
and then maybe

	# disklabel da0

or

	# disklabel da0s1

to identify the partitions. Kepp an eye on which files appear
in /dev.



> 2. Can I read xenix (sysv) 
> filesytem ?

You could try "mount -t ufs -o ro <device> /mnt" for each of
the partitions found, but this will probably fail. However, you
can use a "dump | restore" approach, maybe this works. If not,
you can at least resort to forensic tools which will read the
data independently from the file system information; you might
lose file names, but you can recover file contents. This can
be done in "raw reads" from the disk device.



But as far as I know, _native_ support for classic SysV file
systems does not exist on FreeBSD, nor does it on any other
platform. It's an excavation job for the mantally insane. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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