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I have an old CDROM of media content that will have been intended for use on a Sun Unix machine. The CD packaging gives no details of the filesystem type etc. beyond-

mount -o ro /dev/sr0 /cdrom

Obviously this command was for a Sun workstation. I want to read the disk contents (which are mostly video files I believe), if they look useful I will probably copy them back out to an ISO format disk.

On my Debian 10.0 (Buster) Linux machine, the simple mount command suggested (changing /cdrom to /mnt as the mount point) fails with the error-

mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sr0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

I have checked the CD FStype with file -s /dev/sr0 which gives this result-

/dev/sr0: Unix Fast File system [v1] (big-endian), last mounted on /mnt, last written at Mon Aug 31 14:56:42 1992, clean flag 1, number of blocks 51660, number of data blocks 50838, number of cylinder groups 7, block size 8192, fragment size 8192, minimum percentage of free blocks 0, rotational delay 0ms, disk rotational speed 73rps, SPACE optimization

This indicates the disk FS is the "Unix Fast Filesystem", which should be supported by the UFS kernel module. I do have UFS available-

cat /proc/filesystems | grep ufs
    ufs

However mount -t ufs -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt gives the same error. I'm wondering if it's the endian-ness issue (SPARC being big-endian while X86 is little-endian) but I haven't found a mount option to deal with that. I have found some sources on the net that say that Linux can handle filesystems with either endianness. Maybe it should be auto-detected, but if so that's not woerking.

I would welcome suggestions on how to read this disk (or even just convert it to a readable format).

Incans
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    https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/175594/mount-solaris-partition-in-linux Try mounting using `-o ufstype=sun` – Artem S. Tashkinov Sep 06 '20 at 20:44
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    First UFS is not byte order independent. Second: Linux may not support UFS correctly, as I believe it only supports the incompatible BSD variant. BTW:from when is this CD? – schily Sep 06 '20 at 20:48
  • @schily OP noted "last written at Mon Aug 31 14:56:42 1992" – Aaron D. Marasco Sep 06 '20 at 21:05
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    This is strange since Sun did use ISO-9960 since 1988.Before, they created a few UFS CDs only. Is this probably just the boot filesystem for SPARC? – schily Sep 06 '20 at 21:08
  • @schily that's a good point - OP ran it on `sr0` so it was able to read the partition table. – Aaron D. Marasco Sep 06 '20 at 21:12
  • IIRC Eltorito is from 1995, so an UFS boot was the only way to go in 1992 – schily Sep 06 '20 at 21:27
  • Try adding `-t iso9660` explicitly instead of letting `mount` guess the type. `file -s` is irrelevant since the iso format can be combined with some other kind of disk image -- and that is quite usual. If the disc doesn't contain anything sensitive, make an image of it (with `dd if=/dev/sr0 ...`), post it somewhere and add a link. –  Sep 07 '20 at 13:28
  • Thanks for the comments. The disk is a set of materials from a Sun marketing conference back in the day. I have no reason to believe the disk is bootable, The CD insert indicates the contents are mostly video files (unknown format until I can read the disk) plus copies of presentation papers (again, formats unknown). – Incans Sep 09 '20 at 15:56

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