Accessing BSDi Diskslices On Non-BSD OSes?

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."

I know that it is a lot of data.

[funkman]

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.

A slightly Offtopic Post regarding Amiga ADF

[King of the World]

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?

Re:A slightly Offtopic Post regarding Amiga ADF

[Anonymous Coward]

NO!
Because it's physicly impossible, the floppydisk controller in the Amiga causes the drve to spin at half the speed of the PC drive.
What you can do is add sypport for your old Amiga drive in your PC, but that's the ONLY way.

I had the same problem.

[shippo]

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.

Try NFS

[bko]

It does not appear that FreeBSD will mount BSD/OS partitions correctly.

A simple way to work around this would be to boot the old BSD/OS machine, export all the filesystems via NFS, and then from your new Linux/BSD machine mount the affected filesystems via NFS and then use tar to copy over the files.

While not as nice nor as fast as other options, it is reasonably reliable and avoids bugs in potentially complex code.

FTP?

[Duke of Org]

Can you make the old BSD computer an FTP server?
Then you could just ftp the files over to the new computers.
I don't know if this was exactly what you were looking for though

I've mounted FreeBSD from Linux

[dananderson]

Mounting FreeBSD partitions is old news and has been done before. I've mounted FreeBSD from Linux before, back when I was playing around with FreeBSD. I've also mounted Linux from FreeBSD.

Here's how from Linux:
1. Make sure your Linux kernel supports it. If not, recompile with CONFIG_BSD_DISKLABEL=y in your /usr/src/linux/.config.

2. When mounting, specify the type:

mount -t ufs -o 44bsd /dev/hda8 /mnt where YOU REPLACE hda8 with your disk slice reported on Linux bootup (hint: look for "bsd" in the dmesg command output or in file /var/log/messages).

See the mount man page for details 3. Considere mounting read-only the first time or of you don't plan to modify files: mount -t ufs -o 44bsd,ro /dev/hda8 /mnt 4. If you plan to mount a lot, consider adding an entry to /etc/fstab

Re:Mounting BSDi disk slices under FreeBSD

[Cato]

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