Hi, I'm a programmer with a bit of Linux experience who's found himself thrust into the world of out of date Unix versions and hardware. I could really use some help so I can get back to doing something productive with my work days!
I have been tasked with getting some information off some Jaz 1GB zip disks that were written to from a DEC Alpha station running Digital Unix (OSF/1 3.2) back in the late 90's.
I finally figured out how to reset the root password so I could log in. (And a remarkable number of ways not to do it but work for other people's computers.) Unfortunately I couldn't find the files that had been backed up with the Jaz drive (SCSI 50 pin). So that leaves me with trying to get the drive mounted.
The drive is older than the ones on the Iomega website, and the references to information on there from old newsgroups don't turn up anything useful in searches. The disks come preformatted for DOS. I am unsure how the disks are now formatted. I have attached the cable to the terminating port of the drive since SCSI chains need to be terminated on both ends AFAIK.
When I boot from the consol (which is the mode it starts in when I turn it on), it detects the Jaz drive at the same time as it lists the hard drive and CDROM.
The DEC Alpha does have a copy of mtools on it, which theoretically allows for working with DOS file systems. However I was unable to find anything in /etc/fstab to indicate that anything had been mounted that wasn't normal. A post on a newsgroup by the person who did the backing up years ago indicated that he had entered some information in here, but I couldn't find it, and adding it didn't help.
When I try to mount the drive I use:
mount /dev/rz2c /mnt
Which returns after a brief pause:
I/O Error
Also at my disposal is a Sun Solaris machine which some genius left the C compiler off of. Hopefully that can be rectified. I tried to mount the drive on that machine using the instructions from the Iomega site. However when I hit the stage where it suggests using the format command (where I have a spare blank disk in the drive so I don't risk losing anything), the Jaz drive isn't listed, only the hard drive.
https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/cg...cGFnZT00&p_li=
http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.s...f1b0d8c44f4c61
I have downloaded the code for a program for reading Jaz drives with a Solaris machine, however due to the current lack of a compiler and the inability to detect the drive at all, I've not persued it.
http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/ziptool.html
So, I'm feeling pretty darn stuck... Can anyone point out the hopefully simple mistake I am making?
Bartok
