Need an SCO System V Xenix boot/recovery disk

From: Christopher Smith <csmith_at_amdocs.com>
Date: Tue Dec 18 16:56:09 2001

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Willing [mailto:jimw_at_agora.rdrop.com]

> Now, the bad... while cleaning it up (about 6 lbs of dust in
> the box) and
> getting ready to image off the hard drive (backups are always a good
> thing, no?), either I fumble fingered something or my drive
> test/backup
> program was having a 'bad hair day', cause it nuked the boot
> record on the
> drive! (AARGH!)

Oops. :)

> 'Course... just to add insult to injury, it then went
> happily ahead and
> ran off the image of the hard drive just like I wanted in the
> first place,
> minus a valid boot record of course. B^{

Well, you have a good image. That's a start.

> So... would anyone perhaps have an appropriate boot disk on a 3.5HD
> floppy that I could get, and any convienient hints on how to
> regenerate
> the boot for this thing?

Was it just the MBR that got nuked? Lots of times on intel systems, those
are similar if not identical. All the boot-loader magic is handled in the
second-stage loader near the beginning of the partition, or something like
that. :)

If that is the case, you may be able to replace it with the MBR from an
MS-DOS bootable hard-disk. Also the DOS command FDISK/MBR is known to
restore the MBR to such a state that at least MS-DOS will boot. If Xenix
expected the standard DOS MBR, you'd be all set.

So you could try making an MS-DOS bootable floppy, copying FDISK.EXE to the
floppy, booting the machine from that and running the command. If the Xenix
MBR really is different, then you may still be able to get away with using
the DOS loader, provided there's a second-stage boot-loader in the right
place on the Xenix partition. You would just use FDISK to set the bootable
partition flag on the partition you'd like to boot, and the DOS boot-loader
will try to pass control to a second-stage on that partition.

Once you got in, of course, you could re-install the proper Xenix
boot-loader (instboot?)

I would back up the MBR first. I think there are utilities with most
boot-loader apps that will do that.

(Note that this is more-or-less speculative, but I'd like to know if you try
it, and specifically, whether it works)

Regards,

Chris


Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL

/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
 
Received on Tue Dec 18 2001 - 16:56:09 GMT