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A/UX 1.1.1 - Getting files off

toshiba1

Active member
OK I have had a lot of success and have a Mac II running A/UX 1.1.1, and I am able to mount my old 1989 floppy disks! I can see my old computer source codes -- very cool =)

Now, the challenge -- I want to copy the contents of these floppy disks onto some other media to get them off of the A/UX system and onto my modern PC.

This Mac II is not networked at all

I do not see any way to do this. A/UX 1.1.1 cannot read a HFS floppy disk or a PC floppy. 

Any suggestions are appreciated!!

 

nglevin

Well-known member
I believe DART was originally made for this purpose.

Mac OS X can read DART files, and I believe Disk Copy 6.3.3 can, too. If the DART file is left uncompressed, it's essentially a Disk Copy 4.2 image.

EDIT: I'm assuming that you can find an external SCSI disk, a SCSI2SD or a Floppy Emu to handle moving the imaged floppy disks out of your Mac II.

DART just came to mind because by design, it largely does not care what format your disk happened to be in, and Disk Copy 6.3.3 can read those files on classic Mac OS with the appropriate PC Exchange control panel.

 
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uyjulian

Well-known member
You may be able to copy the files to the root filesystem, image the drive containing the root filesystem, and open the image in Shoebill.

You may also be able to make another virtual disk with scsi2sd, then tar up the contents and then dd to the virtual disk. From the destination system, you can use dd to skip to the offset (there is no +1 or -1) and untar to your destination system's filesystem.

 
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toshiba1

Active member
I am using a SCSI2SD v5.1 with the A/UX 1.1.1 installed on there in this format. I have mounted the various floppies and copied to the root filesystem already actually.  When I boot the Mac II, the SASH Standalone program comes up and I can see the subdirectories there of the floppies I copied there in the window (see screenshot), I feel like I'm close. I also was able to make images of my various A/UX floppies in Mac OS 7.0 using Disk Copy 4.2. Here is a link to one of the images https://github.com/twqwctf/twqwctf.github.io/raw/master/aux/linpack.image

[SIZE=12pt]/dev/disk1[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]#:                   type name               size      identifier

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]0: Apple_partition_scheme                    *1.9 GB   disk1

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]1:              Apple_HFS SASH Partition     2.0 MB    disk1s1

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]2:    Apple_partition_map                    31.5 KB   disk1s2

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]3:           Apple_Driver                    16.0 KB   disk1s3

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]4:        Apple_UNIX_SVR2                    3.0 MB    disk1s5

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]5:        Apple_UNIX_SVR2                    54.3 MB   disk1s6

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]6:        Apple_UNIX_SVR2                    14.0 MB   disk1s7

[SIZE=12pt]   [/SIZE]7:        Apple_UNIX_SVR2                    3.0 MB    disk1s8

IMG_20190825_130723.jpg

 
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nglevin

Well-known member
As I understand this, you're able to copy your A/UX floppies to an A/UX system, and the problem is that you are trying to get those files onto something that a (Windows?) PC can understand. Since this is on a SCSI2SD, they're already on an SD card.

I'm not familiar with A/UX 1.1.1, I am somewhat with A/UX 3. I'm guessing that right now, you're on the A/UX Unix UFS partition and that's where the files are sitting right now. This tech note around A/UX 2.0 compatibility might help, especially the File Manager section that discusses supported file systems.

ufs2tools could work, but that might be too new for the version of UFS that A/UX is using. The Linux.org article on UFS notes that UFS split in two layers for 4.4BSD, which sounds like what ufs2tools is expecting to deal with. Contrast with the A/UX 2.0 compatibility tech note, which states that its supported UFS is based on Berkeley (BSD) 4.2.

 

toshiba1

Active member
Yes that is the correct situation. 

At this point, I have taken the SD card out of the SCSI2SD, put into a Powerbook, did 'dd if=/dev/disk1 of=aux1.iso' and it created a 1.8GB .iso file. 

I am now copying this to my Windows 7 machine and I will attempt to boot shoebill with this .iso.

If that works, the next challenge will be -- how do I get these files out of shoebill =)  -- AUX 1.1.1

 

toshiba1

Active member
OK -- I have this image running in shoebill AUX v1.1.1 and my old files are present.  (see folder 'project4') --  Next step -- how can I get these into Windows 7? 

shoebill1.png

 

nglevin

Well-known member
Looking further down that A/UX 2.0 compatibility tech note, it seems A/UX 1.x formatted its "UNIX" volumes as UNIX System V File System (svfs or s5fs in shorthand) and not the more recent Berkeley 4.2 UFS that A/UX 2 and 3 used by default.

Unfortunately, it looks like there are several variants of s5fs, and resources are hard to find. There was a Linux kernel file system driver project back in 1999. It seems to be extremely dead.

Ideally, what you need is a tool that can read files from ancient UNIX file systems. The next best thing is, get these files moving over a network since you already have a means of doing a full image backup of the A/UX partition and your disk images.

Another means would be to find some bridging OS that can read this partition and move those files onto a more modern file system. That may be tricky, a quick search is only turning up old versions of Solaris/SunOS as SunOS relied on the System V File System at one point... but who knows how much that has in common with the A/UX variant. Of course you could just use A/UX 2.x or 3.x, UFS and HFS, which might be the easiest way out at this point.

 
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toshiba1

Active member
Ok I have figured it out.

What I did:

1- on shoebill AUX 1.1.1 on Windows PC, tarred all my source codes from the late 80's into a single .tar, then uuencoded it (file=aux.tar.uu)

2- on powerbook (or could have used linux, whatever), created a 8k zero-filled disk (dd if=/dev/zero of=DISK5.iso count=32768 bs=1024)

3- Ran shoebill again on Windows PC, this time adding the disk using parameter 'disk0=aux1.iso disk1=DISK5.iso'

4- on shoebill, copy the uuencoded file (aux.tar.uu) directly using dd to the target disk device (no filesystem created here, no mounting) (dd if=aux.tar.uu of=/dev/dsk/c1d0s0) -- this saves the raw bytes onto 'DISK5.iso'

5- on PC, opened 'DISK5.iso' in hex editor to get the starting position + ending position of the uuencoded data (it is all contiguous)

6- on linux, used 'head' and 'tail' to just slice out the raw uu data into a target file named aux.tar.uu

7- ran uudecode on linux to decode to create aux.tar

8- extracted the tar file on unix

 

toshiba1

Active member
One pre-step I never mentioned which is:

-- replicating the AUX 1.1.1 installation which is on my 2GB SD card to the .iso file (aux1.iso) was done by inserting the SD card into an older Powerbook and doing this command:

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=aux1.iso (this creates a 1.8GB .iso)

this allowed me to use the native Mac hardware with SCSI2SD with AUX 1.1.1 and the floppy drive to mount these old floppy disks (mkdir /f ; mount -r /dev/floppy0 /f), then copy the contents of the floppy disk to the SD card and later tar / uuencode all the contents into one file.

 
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rieSha.

Well-known member
OK I have had a lot of success and have a Mac II running A/UX 1.1.1, and I am able to mount my old 1989 floppy disks! I can see my old computer source codes -- very cool =)

Now, the challenge -- I want to copy the contents of these floppy disks onto some other media to get them off of the A/UX system and onto my modern PC.

This Mac II is not networked at all

[…]
I’d use a simple serial / RS232 nullmodem cable to a modern PC, and use Kermit or the like to copy things via serial. In worst case you can UUEncode or HQX the files first, and do a non-binary/text only transmission.

 
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