help (re) booting xenix after cmos battery failure

[Jules Richardson]

Brian L. Stuart wrote:
>> apparently it has his Alfa Romeo motor club data on it (so it's clearly
>> +10yo :-)
> 
> I used to have one of those.  I really miss that car.
> 
>> Anyone know if the xenix fs can be mounted on linux? (I doubt it, but
>> I thought I'd ask)
> 
> Don't quote me on this, but somewhere in the back of
> my head I have a vague memory that Xenix used the same
> file system layout as System V. 

 From the 'mount' man page:

"Note  that coherent, sysv and xenix are equivalent and that xenix and 
coherent will be removed at some  point  in  the  future  --  use  sysv instead"

... I've had quite a bit of luck mounting ancient Unix-and-friends filesystems 
under Linux, albeit often read-only (not a problem if just salvaging data) and 
sometimes with screwy file timestamps (possibly more critical in this case)

The real problem is the partition table, as these are often proprietary and 
not very well documented, and Linux support for alien partition tables is a 
bit sparse. You need to know where the filesystem starts and ends on the disk 
in order to pull it out raw using 'dd' under Linux, and then mount the 
resulting file image as a Xenix filesystem loop option.

For my Tek Unix box I ended up trawling the Tek's raw disk for fragments of 
ASCII related to partition support. That gave me just enough data to 
reverse-engineer the partition table format in the first few blocks of the 
disk, and then get access to the filesystem sizes/offsets. For this case, 
maybe someone has a suitable running Xenix install and can quote the format, 
or has some useful paper documentation...

cheers

Jules