UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello

We had an old system designed in fortran that ran on a IBM RS6000 AIX 3.2 system. The person who designed is long gone. It was replaced with a completely different (non unix) system 6 years ago. We still used it for historical lookups of older information. Well yesterday it died. The hard drive just sounds like its clicking and not spinning. We have some backup tapes of the system from a few years ago but I dont know if they will do me any good. Is there anyway I could recover any of this information? We dont have any of the aix installation disks, just the dead machine, and some backup tapes. Are we out of luck or is there hope?

Bill

If they are tar archives, you can almost surely read the tape on any other UNIX box that has a tape drive.

Even Windows winzip can read a tar file....

The only real problem is reading from the tape if you have no tape drives. There are data service bureaus that can read the tape to another format you can use.

.. assuming the data is in tar format.

THanks

If it helps, this is the command the person used.

smit backup

Then he put in the directory and then the device path. Hopefully this was done correctly.

smit is just a system mgt interface, but backup creates proprietary (not tar) files as far as I know. In order to restore them, you'd have to get another AIX shop to read the tapes.

The standard AIX backup and restore are well documented and can in certain circumstances be transferred to other UNIX machines. However in the past I have experienced a problem especially with older versions of AIX that the blocking length of the backup was such that it was impossible to read on other machines (even other AIX machines).

Can I assume from your post that it is the old RS6000 which has gone bang? If so you can still but SCSI1 disks and with a bit of searching you can still obtain copies of AIX 3.2.5 though not supported by IBM anymore, it fell off the shelf years ago! I have a feeling with enough research on the internet you could recover the machine and the data on the tape. Hope this helps.

I have not been reading all of what is posted but this might be a resource to find pointers for your problem.....

http://groups.google.nl/group/comp.u...f994a669c27481


Regards,
Johan Louwers.