Hello

I wonder if someone could help me in reading a raw (non-Solaris) disk on a Solaris system...

I have an IDE HDD in my Sun Blade and would like to read it (using C). It appears on the system and with the format command shows up as c0t1d0.

I use the dd command to read the disk as such:

rhino# dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 bs=1 skip=0 count=1024
dd: /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0: open: I/O error
rhino# dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 bs=1 skip=0 count=1024
dd: /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2: open: I/O error

but as you can see I get an error.

How do I read a raw, unformatted, non-Solaris disk in my Solaris box?

Any ideas appreciated...

try "/dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s0"?

There are two forms of disk devices, block and raw.

Sorry forgot to say I tried that as well, and no, that doesn't work either.

Try a block size (bs) that matches the drives block size. With a disk it should be multiples of 512.

I haven't tried it, but the point is that it is a raw disk - i.e. FS unknown... so things such as 'blocksize' does not exist or unknown...

I just need to open the device... in a C program... like in Linux the HDD devices are /dev/sda, /dev/hda, etc...

If you are on a sparc box and you want to read a disk you use the backup slice (s2) - this is as opposed to a raw slice.

Also you need to be root to do this.

Yup (from above) doing this:

rhino# dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 bs=1 skip=0 count=1024
dd: /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0: open: I/O error
rhino# dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 bs=1 skip=0 count=1024
dd: /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2: open: I/O error

The same with /dev/rdsk result in the same error, and yes I am root...