27 Mar
2005
27 Mar
'05
11:58 a.m.
On Sun, 27 Mar 2005 14:11:14 -0500 (EST)
der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
I have a question about this that might be answerable by somebody here.
Awhile back I had a drive from an RS/6000 system and was attempting to
figure it out and get into it.
I decided that I would need to use another big-endian system to copy the
drive onto an image file to poke around in it. So I mounted the (SCSI)
drive on a Sparc box here (everybody should have a lunchbox sparc around
for such purposes) running NetBSD and used the dd command to make an
image.
Would it have made a difference if I'd used a little-endian system to
image the drive? My impression has been that it would have, but it's
not something I know a lot about (I'm dyslexic enough in real life
without extending it to hard drives and filesystem endianess)
-Scott
Maybe support
under Linux is a little broken (I know already that
ufs/sun makes assumptions about the endian-ness of the filesystem in
some places)
Yes, if the filesystem really is a SunOS 4.* filesystem, it will be
big-endian. Your Linux FFS support has to be prepared for big-endian
data structures on disk, which if you're on a little-endian
architecture like i386 it may not be.