This is an urgent problem for me!!

There is a UNIX based SCSI Hard Drive installed in a legacy system. I have to transfer all the contents of this hard drive, including the UNIX operating system and some cobol based programs and data files to another hard drive.

How to do this?

I thought of a way: Perhaps I could take out the SCSI hard drive and install in it in a LINUX based PC. Will the Linux operating system automatically pick up the Unix SCSI hard drive and will I be able to copy all the contents to the Linux hard dirve?

Anyone, please help.

SCSI works on all systems (there are a few SCSI standards, but all are supported), it is a universal standard. This however, does not insure that you can mount the disk, that is based on the filesystem type.

The fundamental question is:

What is the filesystem type (or types) of the hard disk?

I posted a thread in the UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users forum titled Can Linux pick up Unix Hard Drive?". This was repleid by Neo. I want to relay the following message to Neo:

All I know is that the hard drive has UNIX installed on it. I don't know whether UNIX uses more than one file systems. Please tell me whether there are more than one and what are their names.

Thank you

Ok, let me ask you another question. What UNIX is installed on it? You do know that there are many different *nix systems. Depending on that, the filesystem type may be different. And yes, there are many different filesystem types used by the different UNIX systems. Sun's Solaris uses UFS by default, HP's HP-UX uses HFS and VxFS, IBM's AIX uses JFS...
Linux supports many different filesystems, so there is a chance that your's may be supported.

"...I have to transfer all the contents of this hard drive..."

If this is the case then you don't have to worry about Linux being able to mount the drive. You could attach the drive to the Linux box's SCSI controller and when it appears use the 'dd' command (google for it, dd is powerful[ly destructive - beware!] and a good command to know) to transfer the entire contents of the drive bit-for-bit (*exact* copy - blank space and all) to another drive, or an image file.

example usage:
#copies the *entire* drive to the image file /tmp/driveimage.img, where the drive has been recognised as the first SCSI disk on the system

dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/driveimage.img


#copies the first partition on the drive to the image file /tmp/part1.img
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/tmp/part1.img

caveat! - if LVM has been involved then this I don't know what the effects might be - could get rather odd.