HP-UX

First of all, forgive me if I come off as naive. Normally I'm doing day-to-day management of a Server 2008 network, so HP-UX isn't exactly my forte.

We have several HP 715/100 machines running UX 9.x, and recently one of them stopped being able to boot. In the boot menu the disk shows up with search, but you can't boot from it. We've got Ignite tapes for the system, but there are files on the disk that weren't backed up within the last and I desperately need them.

So I slapped the disk in an identical system to see if it would boot there, and no dice. So now in that same system I booted off the original disk with the unbootable disk along side it in hopes that I can mount it and recover what I need. In the Disk and Filesystem Manager, the disk shows up unused, but when I try and mount it it says it doesn't have a file system on it. Am I hosed?

Really regretting only doing monthly backups 'bout now...

What filesystem was it using? VxFS? If so, you might get lucky to access the file system from a Linux system (provided the Linux system has to have FreeVxFS kernel module included). However, if the filesystem itself is corrupted, there's nothing more you can do to get the data.

Also, you may try SCO UnixWare which is available for Intel platform, freely available to download and try for 30 days. It has VxFS in built. You can run it in VMWare Workstation. But I am not sure how compatible HP-UX's VxFS is with UnixWare's VxFS provided they have their own implementations.

This is a nearly 20-year-old version of HP-UX. LVM had just been introduced but was not the norm. Suggest you try the HP ITRC board as you are more likely to come across someone who still remembers this O/S.

An HP 715/100 in HP-UX9.XX would likely be a 9.05 (I did see some 9.07 but only at HP...) no lvm... it had something the series 800 did not have (9.04): a utility to generate a bootable tape... but serie 800 9.04 had LVM...
I suppose that if you are only trying to recover sensible data from the disk, forget about booting from it, try to connect as a second disk after creating a mount point, try to mount it and recover your files; then if it is the same disk as the station where you mounted it, you could after having saved all important configuration files and soft... do a dd to clone the disk and put it back in the original 715 then restore the correct configuration - all in single use mode...

Do you know why it is not booting? I did see one not being able because of 2-3 crashes the same day filling /tmp and / to 100%...
The solution was booting single user (or almost...) and use an option of fsck ( forgot what but it is for no sync ) by removing bad files rather than let them go in lost+found and try to reboot in a also no sync mode. Then once it reboots, trying to find out what you lost...
Good luck
Unfortunately Im on vacation next week, because I may have had some documentation in my draws at work...