27 Mar
2005
27 Mar
'05
9:45 a.m.
On Sun, 27 Mar 2005 12:12:27 +0000
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Does anyone happen to know the organisation of a SunOS
4.x hard drive?
[...]
However, obviously some space is taken up by the
partition table
itself, so the first (root) partition can't start at block zero. What
I'm trying to find out is the offset that it does actually start at,
so that I can mount the root partition from Linux.
SunOS 4 is BSD and uses the BSD
FFS. This in turn doesn't use the first
8 kB (16 blocks) in a slice. The first 8 kB (in slice a) are reserved
for the disklabel(5) and first stage boot code. Therefore slice a starts
at sector 0.
You may try to use NetBSD to mount those disks. In the days of NetBSD
1.4 I mounted a SunOS 4 drive from NetBSD/sparc without any trouble.
NetBSD uses the same disklabel(5) layout as Sun and the file system is
AFAIK just the same. (Nevertheless I recommend to mount read only or to
make a image backup before mounting read / write.) It should be easy to
boot your sun3 or sun4 machine diskless with NetBSD from a Linux box.
If you use a litle endian machine with NetBSD to analyze the disk read
options(4) about FFS_EI.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/