22 Nov
2005
22 Nov
'05
6:52 p.m.
I've just come across my first OS9 system, and
know absolutely
nothing about
OS9 other than that it's vaguely UNIX-like. Before I try hooking
the hard disk
up and seeing if it actually works, obvious questions follow:
1) I assume there's a login process. Of course I don't know any
account
details for the system; are there any tricks to breaking in as
there often are
with old UNIX systems?
The stock "login" utility provided by Microware was very, very basic
(not even encrypted passwords; it was designed just as a front end
for selecting user IDs for the super user). An example /dd/sys/
password file would have "super" for the user name, and "user" for
the password. You could even type them both at the login prompt:
Login? super user
But no one should have ever shipped a system with that in place ;-)
2) Assuming I can't log in at this stage, is it
possible to cleanly
shut the
system down? e.g. some magic keypress or login name (as there is
with Apollo
machines)
Power off at will! OS-9 was designed for embedded use and except for
potential disk caching issues if you powered down during a write,
there is no "shutdown" sequence for OS-9.
3) If I can login somehow, how do I then shut the
system down
properly? Is
there a shutdown command in OS9, or is it something else entirely?
Not needed :-) Just make sure nothing is writing to the disk.
On the plus side, the interface between host and disk
unit is SASI,
so there's
a chance I can do a raw backup of the drive via a modern system. On
the minus
side, the physical drive is an ST506 type via an OMTI bridge board,
so I can't
easily go from raw backup to working system without proper low-
level format
utils (which I don't have, although I'm still sorting through
floppies that
came in the same haul)
You can do a web search and find disk utilities for PC and maybe
Linux (and maybe Mac) that will read/write to an OS-9 disk image.
Of course all of this assumes that a) the hard drive
isn't toast
already and
b) that the hard drive which came in the pile of stuff actually
belongs with
this system in the first place :)
You can also find the OS-9 Technical I/O manual online at the CD-i
Association website (netsearch; I don't know the address) and it has
the disk structure in there. Worst case: disk zapper ;-)
-- Allen
http://os9al.com