19 Jan
2009
19 Jan
'09
5:25 p.m.
Brad Parker wrote:
Flush with success (don't you just love it when
things actually work? :-)
I decided to try and boot it. I used a recent copy of qemu and told
it the geometry of the original disk
Congrats :) It's nice when hackery like that works.
Once in linux I made an image of the disk using dd.
It turns out that
the "conv=" option is very important. I used
"conv=noerrors,notrunc,sync".
Originally I use "conv=noerrors" and the resulting image was bad because
the disk had errors.
Yep. Note that some drives benefit from subsequent read attempts when they go
bad - I've hacked together a shell script before to read a single block at a
time and attempt x number of retries for bad blocks, which worked pretty well.
I always intended to rewrite that script as a more useful C program, but
haven't yet got the tuits together...
I then put the resulting disk image on another linux
box and wrote a
tiny C program to search for valid sysv super blocks.
That's a good idea. For my Tek, I managed to reverse-engineer the partition
table (took a while), but your approach is probably better, given that the fs
shouldn't care if you end up with extra data (from the 'next' filesystem)
tacked on the end of the image.
cheers
Jules