Is it possible and how to mount an AIX disk into Linux?

I have a disk from a AIX server that I need to explore in order to recover some data (the server is down).

Is it possible to mount AIX partitions on Linux? How?

The answer is probably No. No commercial distribution comes with this ability to mount AIX's JFS filesystems. So you would need to get JFS modules built/deployed for your Linux. My understanding is that the JFS technology IBM contributed to Linux stems from OS/2 rather than AIX. See this Wikipedia on JFS:

In AIX operating system, there exist two generations of JFS filesystem that are called JFS (JFS1) and JFS2 respectively.1[2] In the other operating systems, such as OS/2 and Linux, only the second generation exists and is called simply JFS.[3] This should not be confused with JFS in AIX that actually refers to JFS1.

Therefore obtaining and building Linux JFS will likely not work.

Quicker to get maintenance on your RS6000 and get it fixed and up and running.

just to let you know that I have written support for linux for discovering and mapping logical volumes of AIX LVM and mounting AIX JFS file systems as found in AIX 3.5 and AIX 4.1 & 4.2. More information at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16569079/which-software-project-for-a-aix-disk-partition-scanner-for-linux

Yes, AIX's JFS can be mounted on Linux. You can just mount it normally using the "mount" command if you have JFS drivers installed (definitely a default with the Suse family and definitely available for Red Hat if not there by default.)

You can reference IBM's own guide for this here: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246622.pdf

Bit late I know, but I assume you've worked out the answer now - no you can't.

The reason isn't just the filesystem format itself, but the AIX LVM stores data on the disk in a different partition format to that of Linux's disk partitioning and LVM options.

The best option available in general is to boot from CD on another pSeries server with the hard drive attached.

By default, Linux cannot natively support the AIX partition table. The filesystem lies on top of the partition table, so the filesystem type does not matter since Linux cannot read AIX.

Think of a partition table in terms of this analogy of mine:

A filesystem is to files as a partition table is to filesystems.