I’ve got an old Novell 4.11 drive (not the OS drive, just data) in an external USB drive enclosure. I can hear the drive spin up, but SUSE 11.1 will not read the drive, it doesn’t seem to even recognize the USB device.
Before I toss the drive as bad, I thought I’d ask: are there extensions or packages that have to be installed on SUSE 11.1 for it to recognize an old 4.11 (nss) drive?
Thanks all!
Seems like you need to first get an enclosure that works properly so that the USB device can be seen before you worry about the next hurdle of whether the HD is visible, and after that, mounting the filesystem.
PS: After plugging in the external drive, do a dmesg and note the last few lines to see if the enclosure and drive were seen.
try ncpfs - should allow access to the filesystem (repo-oss if it’s not already installed)
but you may run into permission problems (as root user on linux you may get by those)
although if the USB device isn’t even being recognized…?
IG
On 2009-11-16, seveninstl <seveninstl@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> I’ve got an old Novell 4.11 drive (not the OS drive, just data) in an
> external USB drive enclosure. I can hear the drive spin up, but SUSE
> 11.1 will not read the drive, it doesn’t seem to even recognize the USB
> device.
Before you say that, run ‘lsusb’ and see it apears in the list. Try with
drive on/off to see the difference.
> Before I toss the drive as bad, I thought I’d ask: are there extensions
> or packages that have to be installed on SUSE 11.1 for it to recognize
> an old 4.11 (nss) drive?
Just because you can’t read the drive, doesn’t mean it’s bad. You can
allways try to reformat the partition (or repartition first) to a
supported FS, ushc as ext2/3/4, (not ReiserFS), xfs, FAT, NTFS…
I don’t think support for Netware formatted drives is build-in. So not
recognizing the content would be normal. It’s not that straightforward,
anyway. Last time I used Netware, you had to partition/format the drive for
Netware, the create volumes in that. If you only hav part of a volume, …
So, first of all: do you need to recover data from that drive, or did you
want to use it for new data?
–
Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.
Thanks for all the responses, but…
Okay, I guess I should have explained “recognize” a little better… the device is visible in “hardware information” in YaST. It shows the make and model of the drive. But, it is not shown in ‘device notifier.’ (When I put an NTFS formatted drive into the same hd enclosure, SUSE recognized it as a USB device and it shows up in ‘device notifier.’ I do not have to mount the drive).
ignz, thanks for the ncpfs info. I thought that was going to solve my problem. But, when I tried to mount the drive, I got the following error, “mount.ncpfs: Server not found.” It seems to be looking for a server, not a drive.
Someone on another forum suggested installing the “nssmu” package. But, I can’t find any info on this package. Can anyone enlighten me?
Oh yeah, while the drive does not have anything I can’t recreate / rewrite, it would be nice to get the data that’s stored there. It’s only a 20 gig drive. But I am planning to do a low-level format and use it - hopefully right AFTER I get the data.
Thanks!
Russ
The only nssmu I know is an nlm (netware loadable module) - now that would definitely need a netware server to install it on (it’s the NSS Management Utiltity in case you hadn’t guessed).
If you’re not in a rush I’ll try & dig out my Novell documentation over the w/e & see what + I can find about ncpfs from that end.
IG
IG, that would be great! I guess my only other option at this point would be to put a machine together and install Novell 4.11, try to remember the server and volume names, admin password, etc.
But, that might still be easier than trying to re-write all my program and script code 
Thanks!!
Russ
Russ
4.11? Now that would be “Intranetware” and Directory Services, before MS “invented” it lol! Ah, those were the days…
IG
4.11 would be a TFS filesystem not NSS ?
Just for info: nssmu is available for SLES as part of OES. May work on OpenSUSE may not.
But as its probably a TFS filesystem not worth bothering with.
sorry
J
haven’t got to the docs yet, but…
tuxituk, yes nss was only introduced with netware5 (or at least 5.x) but (as we’re talking Novell) was it possible to “retro-fit” across a 4.11 server?
russ, I’m wondering if this is going to much more difficult as nss wasn’t just a standalone disk filesystem, I think more of a volume manager service; if the disk was part of an “array” then it may not be easily readable as a discrete disk.
SLES does support nss so an easy (yeah, right) option instead of building a 4.11 might be to throw together a SLES10 box and see if you can get to it that way (with the OS on a separate disk), or someone else has suggested something called Novell Data Recovery Software - don’t know where that came from (Google?) but apparently it’s a commercial software (i.e. it costs) but not from Novell and will run on a Win desktop.
Once it starts looking that complicated/expensive I’d be considering just losing the data - you’ve said it’s nothing critical. Although it would be good to build a 4.11 box if only to be reminded what a great NOS it was.
Still, I’ll see what the books say…
IG
On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:36:01 +0000, ignz wrote:
> tuxituk, yes nss was only introduced with netware5 (or at least 5.x) but
> (as we’re talking Novell) was it possible to “retro-fit” across a 4.11
> server?
As I recall, 4.x was TFS only, NSS was introduced in 5.0. The data
recovery software you’re talking about is OnTrack’s solution, but it’s an
NLM so you have to have a functioning 4.x system in order to run it (have
used it once or twice myself).
If you can get the drive recognized by any system you’ve got, you can
dump the partition table using fdisk (on Linux would be easy to do an
fdisk -l to get the partition table contents). You’ll see that the
partition type is 65 - that’s NetWare 3.x and 4.x. Partition type 69 is
an NSS partition. 64-69 seem to be related to NetWare partition types
across the board.
4.0 introduced on-disk compression and block suballocation in TFS - that
may be why you’re thinking NSS was supported there.
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Moderator
Russ
Sorry, no useful info from the Novell end of things I’m afraid (possibly not surprising, but worth a read).
Back to your (time-)cost/benefit analysis as to whether it’s even worth throwing a Novell/SLES box together with the chance it still won’t be accessible or just bite the bullet & consider the data lost !
IG
On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:46:01 +0000, ignz wrote:
> Novell/SLES box together with the chance it still won’t be
> accessible or just bite the bullet & consider the data lost !
A SLES box won’t be able to read the partition, as SLES has no support
for Novell TFS.
He’ll need to set up a NetWare 4.x server to read the data on the disk.
He might find some help on the Novell forums (http://forums.novell.com )
with this issue, but it’s not really an openSUSE issue, and certainly not
a Network/Internet issue. 
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Moderator
Sorry, didn’t think we’d established it wasn’t NSS (which SLES will support).
But either way, agree it’s not a Suse or network issue.
Can the thread be moved to the “Classic Network OS” forum? Or maybe “Nostalgia”?
IG
On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:26:01 +0000, ignz wrote:
> Sorry, didn’t think we’d established it wasn’t NSS (which SLES will
> support).
If it’s NetWare 4.x, I can pretty much guarantee it’s not NSS, since NSS
was introduced with NetWare 5.0.
> But either way, agree it’s not a Suse or network issue.
>
> Can the thread be moved to the “Classic Network OS” forum? Or maybe
> “Nostalgia”?
“General Chit-Chat” probably is the most appropriate, since it’s
unrelated to openSUSE…but as I said, you may wish to ask in the Novell
forums at http://forums.novell.com (look for the discontinued products
forum).
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Moderator
Moved to general-chit-chat