[Info-vax] Ods2 reader utility mount

[ChrisQ]

Bob Gezelter wrote:

> Chris,
> 
> Before going too far, two recommendations:
> 
> - Make sure that the drive is write locked
> - Do a Hexadecimal dump of the first couple of blocks and make sure
> that it is a home and boot blocks.
> 
> Personally, I would also be tempted to hook it up to a hardware
> forensic write blocker and and also make a forensic copy of the drive
> just in case.
> 
> I would also want to know which controller they were connected to.
> Some controllers did "interesting" things with hardware volumes, which
> could yield unexpected results when looked at as a simple single disk.
> 
> Caution is recommended. Write blockers are not expensive, and a single
> "oops" could make the process much more challenging.
> 
> - Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

Bob,

Thanks for the tips. The drive was made in 1988 according to the 
datecode and is a cdc 94171-307, ~300Mbytes capacity. It needed some 
work in any case, as one of the tant decoupling caps on the 12v rail 
went short (pulled the 12v psu rail down) and needed to be replaced. 
Also, the external carbon brush on the spindle needed cleaning as there 
was too much friction and the drive spun down straight after spinning 
up. Having done that, it runs fine with no funny noises and is a credit 
to its makers. The drive was originally on a Viking QDT scsi controller, 
which I still have, originally on the basis that I may rebuild the 
system at some stage.

Anyway, took the advice from gerry77's post and gave up with ODS2, 
downloading the vmscd utility sources onto a spare Linux box. After 
building and adding a couple of missing libraries, the first iteration 
of "vmscd -d /dev/sdb ls" produced the top level directory and now have 
all my old [USER} tree files on the server.

There was quite a lot of stuff that I really needed to recover - family 
stuff, client RT11 / macro11 library sources dating back to 1987 or so, 
VaxC code and more, so well worth the effort.

Fun stuff indeed :-)...

Regards,

Chris