Beyond my comfort zone here so please forgive if questions appear dumb.
I am trying to recover a stack of files from a SCSI hard drive which was JFS formatted by OS/2 Warp 4.52. The old OS/2 PC died and I cannot install this OS on a modern PC. The more modern version of this OS, called eCS 2.2 does not have a driver for the SCSI card I have. I can however install openSUSE 12.3 on the new machine, which can see the SCSI drive OK and I can also install eCS 2.2 on Virtual Box on the new machine.
I am very nervous about messing with the drive using openSUSE because although I should be able to get it to work with OS/2 JFS system, it would need to make changes and I could mess things up. Using a Clonezilla image I can experiment without further messing up the original.
My plan therefore is to take a disk image with Clonezilla, which I understand can read JFS drives and restore it onto a disk, either in openSUSE native system and in the VM. I can then use either system to play with the image files and hopefully read them.
I think I will be OK restoring an image, if I get one, to a drive on openSUSE system, but I am lost as to how I should do this to a “drive” in Virtual Box. If anybody has any comments on strategy and advice it would be gratefully received.
A brief investigation suggests if your objective is to simply extract the files, you may not need to actually try to restore or mount the jfs disk in a virtual machine… You should be able to access the jfs directly from any Linux kernel, if you’ve enabled the required kernel module an fs utiliites.
Here are your JFS utiliites (assuming you’re running openSUSE 12.3) software.opensuse.org:
But,
All the above might be difficult. Skimming the Arch article, it involves re-building the kernel.
My suggestion?
Linux as 2 virtualization technologies you might be able to make use of… but I’m not finding immediately. If you look around more than I have and maybe even ask a question in a forum or 2, this might become trivial for you.
Linux has 2 virtualization technologies that support invoking a <pre-built> kernel in a virtualized environment, qemu-system and user mode linux(uml). In both these cases, you only need to find a kernel published somewhere. Find that pre-built kernel, and it’s almost trivial after that to construct the command line that invokes that kernel with its own file system (likely appropriate for the version of that kernel) and also point it to your OS2 file system.
BTW - you should dd your OS2 to something for archiving so you won’t lose it.
Otherwise,
Your Q about restoring a Clonezilla image to a VB or most any other virtualization technology) can be tried. the procedure wouldn’t be much different than restoring to bare metal, only your target is different.