Want to read old HP-UX FS floppy diskettes

[Rudy Williams]

Hello--

I have some old floppy diskettes that were written from an HP-UX workstation (don't know what version of the OS). The workstation is no longer around and we would like to recover the data on the diskettes.

We have tried reading the diskettes from a couple of operating systems, however, nothing recognizes the filesystem.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can read the data?

cjw

[Charles Harris]

Hi Cjw,

Unfortunately, I've been in the same situation before and it was almost hopeless, we used a Data recovery company who managed to salvage a partial read....

Not the cheap option mind..

Best of luck!

-=ChaZ=-

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Sometimes it is possible to just read the raw data with dd and try to salvage the data that way. But this only works if it humanly readable.
I do have some old HP workstations with floppy drive at home, but the HPUX version (6.5!) on it wasn't millennium proof, resulting in fsck destroying the filesystems, so it is running NetBSD now... Perhaps someone can help you with more information running HPUX 9.x on a hp9000/400 or hp9000/300 system ?

[doug mielke]

I'd go with dd if=/floppyname of=/outfile

then try to read the out file with the basic cat or strings outfile.

[Pete Randall]

Christopher,

I've got a floppy drive in my HP-UX 11i workstation. If you'd like, I could take a crack at reading one of these for you. You can contact me via e-mail (the address is in my profile) if you're interested.


Pete

[Volker Borowski]

Hi,

in addition to dougs approach, I'd create a logical volume in a sufficiant size (10M) and dd the floppy to the rlvol devicefile.

If it is a backward readable filesystem, you might be able to mount the lvol block-device.

Hope this helps
Volker

[Brian Markus]

I've had a lot of luck recovering data using Linux machiens. The newer versions can read just about any OS foramt. You may want to look into which flavor/release of Linux can read HPUX disks. While it may be "unsupported" it might work.

I definately think you should try the dd. That may do the trick.

There is a program named "winimage" out that you can do a raw copy of a floppy into an image file. What you might want to do is download the freeware version, make a copy on to the hard drive, then send a copy of the disk over the net to people willing to help. (Asuming it's not confidential data) They can open the program and click write to disk and it should work. It doesn't care what format the disk is. Then they can take a shot at recovering.

Good luck.

-Brian.