According to celodex :
> Hi people, i'm new of this group . In this moment I am repairing a VME
> system very similar to a sun sparc-3x. The Hd probably contains a Unix
> System V.

Hmm ... if it *is* a Sun, "sparc-3x" does not make sense. The
sparcs are all '4' not '3' numbers. The sun3 line used a Motorola 68020
CPU, and the Sun-3x used a Motorola 68030 CPU. Neither of these were
anything like a SPARC CPU.

IIRC, the only desktop sun3x machine was the 3/80 -- a box which
looked like a SPARCstaion 2, but had the 68030 CPU. There was also a
VME board containing the sun3x CPUs (68030) for some of the late servers
of that period, I believe, though I've never seen one.

And the Sun-3 and Sun-3x machines ran SunOs 4.1.x, with 4.1.1_U1
being the last offered. These were not SysV machines, but rather BSD
based machines. SysV did not come into the Sun line until Solaris 2.x
(which was also called SunOs 5.x).

> my problem is to go to read the content of the hard disk
> since the machine does not make the boot and i must know if it is the
> hard disk that it has lost the content or it is the machine that is out
> of order. I have attacked therefore the HD to the scsi card of my PC,
> the system reveals it correctly but since file system is not
> compatible with Windows it reveals nothing. How I make to read the
> content of the hard disk? there is an utility that allow to read a file
> system that differs from the classics ntfs or fat?

Well ... there were SunOs 4.1.x versions (through SunOs 4.1.4)
available for the Sparcs as well -- sun4 and sun4c at least. These
would read the disks from the Sun 3 machines.

Beyond those lines, they would only run Solaris (the SysV based
Sun unix). But even Solaris 2.x would read the disks from the BSD
flavors, though you need to be careful to not run fsck on it in any mode
which allows writing to the disk, as it will "update" the filesystem to
a state which the older OS can't read.

However -- for using a Windows box for the task -- Hmm ... I
would look for a BSD flavor with a "livecd" version (boot and run from
the CD-ROM without touching the computer's own disk). This would
probably be able to read the disk in question. Again -- be careful to
not let fsck write to the disk, as it also might update the disk beyond
use. You might even be able to do it with a livecd version of linux,
though I'm not sure about that.

Actually -- used Sun boxes are cheap enough at hamfests or on
eBay so you could probably dedicate one of those to making sense of this
disk. (Though I'm not sure how cheaply they can be found in Italy,
which appears to be where you are posting from.)

You could also try to find a set of distribution tapes for the
Sun3x line (those did not come in CD-ROMs to the best of my knowledge),
and try booting far enough to install a "mini-root" in the disk's swap
space.

If you were local, I would try giving you a hand on reading that
disk -- but you are far too far away. There is a big pond between us.

Good Luck,
DoN.
--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

In article <1144537135.691471.109420@j33g2000cwa.googlegroups. com>,
"celodex" wrote:

> Hi people, i'm new of this group . In this moment I am repairing a VME
> system very similar to a sun sparc-3x.

A what?

If it's a Sun, I assume you are talking about a Sun 4/370 box which
IIRC was VME-based.

> The Hd probably contains a Unix
> System V.

Actually, it probably doesn't. If this really is a Sun machine,
it probably contains a version of the berkeley FFS, i.e. ufs.

>My problem is to go to read the content of the hard disk
> since the machine does not make the boot and i must know if it is the
> hard disk that it has lost the content or it is the machine that is out
> of order. I have attacked therefore the HD to the scsi card of my PC,
> the system reveals it correctly but since file system is not
> compatible with Windows it reveals nothing. How I make to read the
> content of the hard disk? there is an utility that allow to read a file
> system that differs from the classics ntfs or fat?

Perhaps someone else has an idea other than hooking it up to another
Sun box. You can configure a (readonly?) UFS driver with linux, but
I don't believe that UFS is endian-neutral, which means that your
x86 PC won't read it even with a UFS driver.

Karl