Recovering DATA from sparc classic

I have a Sun sparc classic that I am trying to recover data off. The main CPU part just clicks or beeps when powered up, but does not come on (nothing on screen, and LED in front not lighting up).

There is also an external SCSI drive, and I have verified there is a drive inside the CPU.

Not sure what to do here. If I can get the sparc classic working I could hook it up over Ethernet and mount my telnet or mount my QNAP TS259 running Ubuntu, which sounds like it would be easiest.

I guess my other option would be to extract the drives out of CPU and drive enclosure and put a PCIe SCSI card in my windows 7 machine, and start googling solutions to access the drives. If I knew how to open that Sun hard drive up would be nice to ......... I have opened the CPU and see the SCSI drive.

Any body have any suggestions that would be great.

Find another working SPARC device with the proper SCSI interface(s).

I don't think you're going to be able to recover the data on an x86 box.

1 Like

How about if I try and repair this sparc station?

yes, you can do it on x86. connect it to (pci or similar) scsi card, make a dd image, and use qemu to emulate Solaris9. better yet, I think Linux can mount sparc ufs directly from raw image.

There's likely to be an endian issue in your file system. It SHOULDN'T hurt to try though, especially if you just try getting your data from an image file. I'd be real leery of trying to mount the file system directly.

should be possible on Linux: Can you mount UFS partitions made in Solaris (Sparc) on Solaris (x86)? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
iirc, I managed to mount it long time ago.

Does the drive spin up when you apply power to the drive enclosure? If the drive does not spin up, you are not going to be able to recover the data without specialist help.

but, I think, scsi drives have jumper for 'Auto Spin Up', so perhaps its not a telltale sign.

Then remove the jumper and apply power to the disk. If the disk does not spin up, you are waiting your time trying to get data off it.