[michelangelo]

Good morning . I know there are a few tutorials about how to clone a root drive, but this case is a bit different.

SCENARIO
I have an octane2 with the original drive (and delicate data in it). I have NO root password hence is a bit of a brick and can't use this drive as foundation for extra work / cloning.

PROCESS
The machine has 3 slots so my plan is

Slot 1) Clean install of Irix. Currently done and working fine ; )
Slot 2) Insert the original drive to clone
Slot 3) Insert a clean drive where n2 will be copied.

All the procedures I find online assumes 2 drives only, the root to be cloned and the target. Is there a different procedure in my case since the actual OS running the machine is in slot 1 and I have the luxury of 2 extra empty slots ? 

After the clone is done I will clean the root password of the copied disk and try to gain control again of the original data... but for safety I want to mess up the clone only.

Thanks in advance.

[Linux-RISC]

You could boot IRIX installation (or from a new IRIX installation), mount the original root partition and clean root password by editing the line for root in /etc/passwd.

After this procedure, you can clone the hard disk using for example https://github.com/Linux-RISC/IRIX-disk-cloning (quick'n'dirty translation).

Edit: if you don't want to modify the original disk, the method you propose is correct and should work.

[weblacky]

I will add one thing, you could do a some kind of ftp/ssh/etc network based tarball of the original disk before disk-to-disk cloning.

Perhaps by just focusing on another HDD setup under Irix and getting all the freeware command utilities working before hand.

The only reason I bring this up has to do with the fragility of the original drive. Unless you’re very certain about this drive a disk to disk copy using an image or other sector dumping method may result in the failure of the original drive because of its age and the workload.

Using a method other than file base copying means that if you have a failure during the initial procedure you’ve lost everything because you don’t even have the file system working at the destination with the files you’ve already copied.


Normally if you care about the data and it’s all about the data of course, you tend to want to try file-based backup of the source first, starting with the most critical files early than proceeding to the files you don’t necessarily care about, like the OS.

That is you copy files based on order of importance. Until you have everything. Then you’re free to try the whole thing again with another form of copy without much fear of a disk failure because at least you have the individual files themselves sitting on a network file
server somewhere or whatever that you could always load a new IRIX via install media and piece back together the software & data manually, at worst case.


I work at a business where some data recovery is considered part of the job and if you don’t necessarily know the condition of what you’re dealing with you go for the golden statue first and then work your way outside to the surrounding, less important, treasures until you have everything.

I’ve seen people just immediately go for sector base copying or DD or something like that to a destination disk only to have the disk with the source fail and now they’re left with nothing, in order to even recognize the data they already have they now need advanced file recovery tools because they’re dealing with a portion of a destination file system. Instead of having a known, working, destination file system and simply copying files first.