SGI Fuel + old EFS drive

[Pot Roast]

Greetings!

My IRIX fu is weak, and that's why I'm here. I have an old SGI Fuel
with IRIX 6.5.x on it. I also have an old hard drive from an Octane
that some user wants data from, but the old drive is formatted EFS. I
can't seem to get the current IRIX install to see the drive in any
usable manner. It kept telling me that the headers were corrupt, but fx
let me label the headers successfully.. I think. Hardware Manager isn't
letting me access the drive, but I can see it on the desktop. I can
initialize it and get basic info on it, but that's about it.

I'm not sure where to go from here.

Another problem is that the box is at work, behind oodles of firewalls,
and we have no usenet access from work. (ugh)

If anybody has any ideas or if it's just a matter of "EFS is too old to
deal with" then by all means, let me know. Failing that, is there a
Knoppix like LiveCD that I can boot from? I tried it on a Linux
machine, but no dice.

Cheers!

[Bjorn Ljungdahl]

Here
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=0650&db=bks&fname=/SGI_Admin/IA_DiskFiles/apa.html
is says EFS support will be discontinued in future IRIX releases,
but 6.5.x should still be able to use it.

[josehill]

Hmm...

Be careful about initializing, etc. Unless the drive is damaged or
erased, it should be readable without changes on the Fuel, and most
modern Linux kernels have EFS support built in.

You might want to post the question at http://forums.nekochan.net/ --
it gets a bit more attention these days than the comp.sys.sgi* groups.

[corn]

what does your /etc/fstab look like? what do yo mean by "initialize"
and "basic info"--it tells you how big the disk is?

What does

mount -t efs /dev/dsk/dks0d1s0 /disk2

return? Naturally your s0d1s0 and /disk2 may vary. Like your mileage.

[Steven Hirsch]

The kpartx utility may come in handy. See appropriate man page.