Situation - i have an IDE hard drive from server apparently running SCO last used in 2003. No access to computer it was formerly in. I need to access the drive to pull off data files from a billing/scheduling program. I have no SCO machine or access to one atm. Have some limited Linux knowledge. Have not been able to access drive in any way with Linux through my knowledge of using normal mount commands (or with any Windows software that i have found).

Am i going to have to download/install SCO on a box or are there any other ideas on how to access the hd's file system.

Thank you in advance

Was this the boot drive or secondary drive from the original system.
If it was the boot drive, try putting it into a standard P3 machine, and see if will boot, (assumes that you know the root password).
If it is a secondary drive, then you should download the SCO 5.0.7 ISO file from The SCO Group, Inc. | Support | Update | Download | Release
and install with a 60 day eval license, onto a fresh hard drive, and then afterwards add the old disk as a secondary drive. There are earlier posts that will guide you in adding a second disk that has data on it.

I was under the impression this was the only drive in the server, but did not know a login password so hadn't tried booting it up. I tried to boot in an old machine with following results:

not a directory

boot not found
Cannot open
Stage 1 boot failure: error loading hd(40)/boot

So, what can be determined from this?

I guess i'm on to option 2, of trying to install SCO 5.0.7, and using old drive as a secondary drive.

Try two more things before you give up.
Go through the CMOS settings, and try the other two disk geometry settings. Usually there is a choice of three. Natural, LBA and Large.
SCO often works best with Natural.
If none of these work, then your only option is to try mounting it as a secondary drive.
If you think that the integrity of the drive is in question, you can use Norton Ghost to duplicate it (you can't change any of the volume sizes though).