Mounting ULTRIX CDROMs on Linux

[Jonathan Stone]

 Ultrix UFS is 4.2SD plus some big fixes. It's definitely pre-4.3BSD. So 44BSD won't work.
I hit fsck errors anytime I mounted Ultrix FFS read-write with (very early NetBSD).
You may be better off if you can try with *BSD.


OSF1/Digital Unix/Tru64 has a newer FFS, definitely 4.3BSD or newer -- perhaps 4.4-Lite? -- but I've never tried it with Ultrix media.

     On Thursday, May 20, 2021, 01:00:51 PM PDT, Antonio Carlini via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:  
 
 I'm running Linux Mint (an ubuntu derivative) and I want to mount ULTRIX 
CDROM discs to see what I can see.

(I'm eventually going to image these, but I presume that will "just 
work" with dd or ddrescue).

They are supposed to be UFS format (according to the net) and that 
usually means you have to tell mount exactly which option to use (as not 
all UFS implementations are compatible).


I've tried (all the options I can find) and failed:


$ sudo mount -t ufs  -o ufstype=44bsd /dev/sr1 /tmp/mount
mount: /tmp/mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on 
/dev/sr1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.


The CDROM would appear to be readable 9and I've tried a few anyway):

$ sudo file -s /dev/sr1
/dev/sr1: Unix Fast File system [v1] (little-endian), last mounted on 
/UPS_MOUNT_TAR_SOURCE, last written at Wed Sep 28 16:27:45 1994, clean 
flag 30, number of blocks 243648, number of data blocks 233295, number 
of cylinder groups 38, block size 8192, fragment size 1024, minimum 
percentage of free blocks 10, rotational delay 0ms, disk rotational 
speed 60rps, TIME optimization


A later Digital Unix CDROM behaves the same way with mount and reports 
this with file:

$ sudo file -s /dev/sr1
/dev/sr1: Unix Fast File system [v1] (little-endian), last mounted on 
/kits/tmp/gendisk17665/mnt, last written at Wed Nov 20 13:38:02 1996, 
clean flag 3, number of blocks 151168, number of data blocks 150383, 
number of cylinder groups 24, block size 8192, fragment size 1024, 
minimum percentage of free blocks 0, rotational delay 0ms, disk 
rotational speed 60rps, SPACE optimization


I also have a few OSF/1 CDROMs, which I assume are also the same format.


Any ideas? I can't be the first person to try to do this ...


Antonio



-- 
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com