Re: Booting SCO 3.2v4.0 hard disk image in VMware or Bochs

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Bela Lubkin wrote: 
But from what you describe, there's a pretty big problem to start with.
If the image is from an IDE drive, it isn't going to be happy suddenly
booting up on a SCSI disk.  Fortunately, VMware will also emulate IDE
disks.  So that should be your first move: reconfigure your VM to use
IDE.  If you didn't see that option, create a new VM and look again.
Tell it you're installing "other/other" OS.  When you get to the disk
setup, you may need to click on "advanced" to get to the IDE-vs-SCSI
options.


First, thanks for the response!  Extremely helpful information.

Ok - I went ahead and created a new .vmdk file with the appropriate C/H/S, etc. and pointed to the raw disk image as an IDE device (IDE:0:0)...

As a diagnostic, you can boot with:

 Boot
 : defbootstr prompt

The kernel will load, then (still in the boot program) you'll get a
prompt before the kernel starts running.  If you don't make it to the
prompt, that tells us something.  I think you _will_ get that far.  At
that point, type "v" (return) and you should get a memory map.  Post
that, trying to keep it accurate...


Ok - here's a console screenshot of the memory dump:
https://webspace.utexas.edu/daihatsu/public/memory-dump.png

Pressing enter causes the virtual machine to reboot at that point.

HTFS first appeared in OSR5.0.0, so that isn't the problem with mounting
under Linux.  It probably doesn't have the right driver to _find_ the
filesystem in its division within a partition.  You can overcome that by
using `dd` to chop out just the filesystem -- if you can figure out its
start block.  There are many ways to do this, none of them easily
described in a few words...

Ahhhhh... ok, well I'll go Google around for divvy, I had no idea there were multiple filesystems within one partition!

That's good to know it cannot be HTFS...

Yet another route would be to install OSR5 (any version you can get to
fly) on an IDE drive within a VM.  Then add the 170MB image as a second
IDE drive and use `mkdev hd` to attach it.  Or, again you could use `dd`
to slice out just the filesystem, then put it onto any OSR5 system (real
or virtual) as a single large file, use `marry` to make it into a block
device, and mount that.

This is probably the easiest route if I can't figure out where the filesystem resides within that partition. Does SCO offer a Knoppix-style, bootable rescue disc of some kind? (just wondering... it could be hidden somewhere on ftp://ftp.sco.com/ or ftp://stage.caldera.com/ :)

Robert Giles

.

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