sco xenix problems

Hi everyone,

I am trying to recover data from a drive taken out of a SCO Openserver system. From what I can tell the drive is using the xenix file system and I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to mount this drive successfully? Whenever I try to mount it with the -t xenix flag it tells me that this filesystem is not supported by the kernel is there anyway i can go about recompiling the kernel or am I going to have to go for a full install and compile xenix support into it?
Thanks guys your help is much appreciated!

Rob

I went through this several years ago.From what I could find out then,xenix
support has been taken out of the kernel.You might be able to build an older kernel with support,but I think you'll end up having to build a system to boot it on.I gave up on it.The job didn't pay enough to justify the effort involved.
You might be able to find the installation disks for an old distro that has xenix support enabled.You'll end up installing an obsolete system just to recover
1 hard drive.A few years ago,a professional data recovery company quoted $500 for this service.
If any gurus know anymore about this,I'd love to hear about it.I still have an image of this drive created with dd.
There is a xenix usenet group that's active,but I didn't get much help there
back then.Maybe you'll do better.There was a xenix boot disk mentioned,but I could never find a download src.
This drive came out of an OLD system that ran xenix.I'd make sure the drive you have is actually xenix format.What does "fdisk -l" tell you?
From what I've read,SCO Openserver supports quite a few file systems
I assume you've tried -t auto
Maybe -t sysv(didn't work for me though)
Let us know how you do.
Good Luck

Hello Robert,

my bet is that xenix is what the filesystem signature is shown as by linux tools (cfdisk etc), but if the drive is from an OpenServer system, it's more likey formatted as HTFS - xenix is *very* old. I don't think linux ever was able to mount these, unfortunately. Your best bet might be to try to find someone with an OpenServer system willing to mount your disk and copy its data over a network or say a FAT filesystem. SCO used to allow home users to get free evaluation copies of their OS, so if you're desperate enough, you might try to see if that is still possible and install it on a spare machine and salvage what you can yourself.