Knoppix not recognizing a FAT SCSI hard drive

[Mr. Mack]

I recently began the impossible undertaking of backing up old NeXT Computer's hard drives, 2 of them, 1GB each, stored in what I believe was some sort of FAT formating. I downloaded and burned a copy of Knoppix understanding that it would be capable of understanding the unix and formatting of the NeXT computer hard drives as SCSI, being linux itself. However, this is not the case, and Knoppix is only recognizing the hard drive as one large unallocated hard drive, with no partitions of which to speak.

The hard drives themselves is still bootable on the NeXT computer interface, however the networking hosts file seems to be corrupted, as is the root password (roots' password can be reset a seemingly infinite number of times, and it will take the new password you give it, and yet you still have no root permissions, with or without super user on). This prevents us from moving over the 1.09gb and 1.04gb hard drives on 3 1/2 inch floppy drives as well (which hardly hold any information).

These hard drives have some fairly valuable information that I am trying to simply back up onto a thumb drive.

Any suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.

~Mr. Mack

[Mr. Mack]

EDIT: BLUNDER ON MY PART,

Turns out the harddrive is a UFS formating, however while I can make clones of it all day long, I need data pulled and usable in a windows environment.

[don999]

EDIT: BLUNDER ON MY PART,

Turns out the harddrive is a UFS formating, however while I can make clones of it all day long, I need data pulled and usable in a windows environment.

if you haven't given up yet...

I would try to mount the scsi drive as a ufs filesystem with something like

mkdir /mnt/a
mount /dev/sda /mnt/a -t ufs -o ro (use read only and ufs filesystem)

although I'd imagine that wouldn't work if the ufs partition doesn't start at the beginning of the drive. I'm guessing that it doesn't.

you could try to list partitions with a fdisk -l /dev/sda

and mount it with mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/a -t ufs assuming that knoppix can "see" the partitioning.

otherwise look for the starting offset of the ufs partition with hexdump -C /dev/sda | less

mount /dev/sda /mnt/a -o offset=32768,ro -t ufs if the starting offset is 32768 for example, and mount in read only


once you've got it mounted you should be able to list files and copy them to another drive, or a network mount.