NCR 3430 problems

edited July 2015 in Software
I have an NCR 3430 MP-RAS SVR4 UNIX System ( NCR UNIX System V/386 Release 4.0 ) and a year ago would normally boot until the part it would ask for a username and a password, but now after it checks everything (RAM, CPUs and Disks) it says " vfs_mountroot:cannot mount root " and it won't accept anything from keyboard (ex: Ctrl-Alt-Del) ( the /root and the /user is installed on separate disks ). If you have any ideas please tell and help ! :)

Comments

  • The disk root is on is probably dying.
  • before i take it and try to fix it they told me that sometimes the disks would not spin when powered up :( . So... can i do anything to save it or get to previous state where it would boot without problem to login ? :?
  • What kind of hard drives does it have in it?
  • 2 Quantum DSP3107L SCSI 50pin 1.07 GB, one "/root" the other one "/user"
  • A good, SCSI. What I would do as a first step, is hook those up to a Linux PC with a good SCSI card (such as an Adaptec AHA-2940), DD the entire contents of the hard drives to a file, and get that all archived off.

    If the drives aren't always spinning up, there are various tricks that might get them going (tapping, warming, cooling, etc), but you will want to replace those drives.

    If they spin up Ok, Then I would "refresh" and test the disks to ensure there are no serious disk errors, and force any weak sectors to re-map. You can do that by dd-ing the hard disk back to itself, or use a "low-level" formatter such as that built in to AHA-2940 BIOS, and then restore the contents.

    Once you have verified the hardware as sufficiently functional, you may then need to repair the filesystem.
  • I use ubuntu 14.04 and i found an old AHA-2930CU. I booted on Ubuntu hooked the scsi disks on my computer but the filesystem seems to be UFS and i cannot read them. I also use gparted and fdisk -l and fdisk -lu to find the disks so i can clone them but it didn't work out.
  • Download a FreeBSD installer disk and start it in shell mode.
  • i am downloading to burn to cd-r the FreeBSD-8.4-RELEASE-i386-disc1
    ( found here https://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.4R/announce.html ) and then boot from the NCR, right?
  • From its own it didn't have a CD-ROM so i added one i had and put the cd with the freebsd but it's not booting from it, it goes straight to the disks and " vfs_mountroot:cannot mount root " again
  • Anyone any ideas?
  • I think you misunderstood. You don't need to mount or recognize the file system yet. Just archive the content off as one big file directly from whatever /dev/sd? device Linux maps to that SCSI hard drive.

    Doing anything with the file system is dangerous until you have verified the integrity of the drives themselves.

    Your NCR 3430 would contain unusual hardware and is likely not fully IBM PC compatible. This class of machine would not know how to boot from a CD. And even if it could, FreeBSD is not likely to still support that sort of hardware.

    You would boot FreeBSD on a more recent computer (perhaps whatever you are running Linux on), with the SCSI drives connected, and then try to mount the file systems. But I am not familiar with those filesystems or what filesystems FreeBSD currently works with.
  • I installed FreeBSD to a USB Stick 64GB and run it from there. When i added the SCIS drives it tried to boot from them and again the message error was vfs.root.mountfrom.options=rw (that i think read write and i'm not enabling it on the scsi drives) but it can see the filesystem of the drives "UFS" (? Unix filesystem ?). So now what? I'm kinda lost
  • Don't mount the filesystems! Use dd to create a copy of the disk onto somewhere else, like the network or a USB stick. Be careful, as you could possibly reverse the parameters and break things. (You can use any Unix for this.)
  • It mounted it self, i didn't do it. I have used in the past dd in Ubuntu so i can i do it again, i just need to find the commands and i copy the scsi disk in the usb stick.
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