How can I successfully mount an 8-bit SCSI drive on a modern computer?

Solution 1:

Old NeXT hardware. SWOON!

Getting a SCSI2 -> SCSI 1 adapter should be trivial. There were both internal and external varieties. Google is your friend. For some reason I thought the "newer" slabs should be SCSI2 but it's been a long time.

You still have to terminate the SCSI chain. Keep to addresses 0-7.

Further just Googling for "scsi-2 pci card" comes up with hits. An Adaptec card for instance should still have good working SCSI support on linux. Looks like one can be had for ~$20.

Here's the thing tho. How the heck are you going to read the file system using anything BUT NeXTSTEP? I suppose you might be able to boot an old NeXTSTEP/OpenStep Intel cd, and ftp/scp/rsync over the files you're looking to save after you've mounted the drive. The trick would probably be finding an Adaptec card which OpenStep supported.

Good luck!

Solution 2:

I've got a NeXTStation slab, and I'm trying figure out why it doesn't boot. I removed the drive from the NeXTStation and installed it in old PC (IBM Z Pro) with an onboard UltraWide SCSI controller. I found an adapter which converts from the 80-pin UW-connector to the old style 50-pin connector used by SCSI-1 drives. Other obvious choices could be digging up an SCSI-1 controller. If it's a NeXTStation slab, the drive is probably already terminated with SIL-style resistors, so you don't need any on the SCSI cable.

I booted up the system and the drive was detected as /dev/sdc. Before doing anything else, I took a complete backup of the entire drive like this:

dd if=/dev/sdc of=backup.img bs=$[1024*1024*32]

It's a Seagate ST1280 drive, so the resulting file was around 238MB. After this, I manually added the ufs module to the kernel, although this may not be necessary:

modprobe ufs

I'm running Fedora 21, so the ufs module was part of the kernel-modules-extra package. After this, the disk can be mounted with this command:

mount /dev/sdc /mnt/nextstep -t ufs -o ufstype=nextstep

The UFS module installed from kernel-modules-extra only supports read only though, as seem with dmesg:

ufs: ufs was compiled with read-only support, can't be mounted as read-write

If you need to mount it read-write, you probably need to recompile the kernel and/or module.