[jwhat]

Hi mgcenroe,

given machine cannot boot as is, your best bet would be to pull disk and put it on either another SGI box or a Linux (RedHat) Box with XFS file systems support.

I have successfully mounted IRIX disk with old Fedora Linux and so I know this is possible, but have not tried with more recent Linux.

Your safest bet would be to mount disk read only to avoid further possible corruption of disk.

You can convert a "working" HD to SSD quite easily by using ACARD SCSI -> SATA adaptor (expensive) or LSI SAS3442X PCI SCSI/SATA Adaptor (cheap).

The process of copying boot disk is well documented (and there is a shell script for this around), in summary:

1. Use dvhtool to copy files out of the source boot disk header
2. Use fx -x to get source disk partitiion details (is it: root + swap or root + swap + user) and note the boot header details ( boot disk likely to have: boot = /unix in header)
3. Use fx -x to partition target disk
4. Use dvhtool to copy the boot header files into target disk volume header
5. Use xfs_dump / xfs_restore to copy file sytems over (either directly or indirectly)

On IRIX disk diagnostics:
- fx has a excercise option that will tell you if disk is good or not, but not repair it.
- IRIX has low level SCSI commands tools, but if you going to pull the disk and put into another machine, I think it would be easier to use linux tools for this.

NOTE #1: you cannot boot from SSD on LSI SAS/SATA Adaptor... but can copy the boot disk so to boot from SSD you will need ACARD or equivalent.

NOTE #2: use dd to create a bit level copy of your disk, if you want to try to do deep explore, I have never tried this but if might be loop mountable on Linux with XFS..

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John