John Esak needs assitance

[Jason Garner]

Good Evening fellow fileproers,

John Esak has run into some issues with a SCO box and needs some help. He
asked me to send this email to you guys.

In addition to the story below, he is also having trouble installing an
.elf file as root from /tmp in Centos7...getting a permission denied
installing as root. He said he had this problem and Ernie showed him how to
get around it.


"

FilePro listers,

Today, I had someone change a cable around in a SCO 5.07 system that is
just barely limping along until its eventual death.  I have no “recovery”
media… the kid did not follow my instructions precisely. He changed the
cables around on the optical drive, and to do this and get to the SATA
cable buttons, he had to unplug the primary hard driv’es cable at the
motherboard.

I told him this was all right if he plugged everything back in the same way
it was.  When he was done, I told him now turn the power back on and we
will boot up.  He said, “How do I do that? It says, “Safe to power off…” on
the monitor.



HE had not powered down the machine as I specifically told him to do by
pressing the power button in for 4 seconds before taking the side off the
computer!  Obviously when he moved around the cables he sparked one of them
somehow, and it destabilized the primary hard drive in some funky way.

When we did power off and reboot, it actually came to the boot prompt, but
then after pressing ENTER, it went into a PANIC stating that it could not
mount the primary device.  ☹



Then it put up the nmessage about trying to dump xxx blocks to the swap
space…



This at least tells me that the kernel was still working properly, and
there is a chance (a small one…) that the drive can be “fixed”… meaning it
might be possible to fsck the file system and put things back to rights… in
which case, the system will be able to mount it once again.



The problem is, I have no SCO machine of 5.07 vintage,  and no SCO machine
of any vintage at all to connect the drive to in order to attempt to fsck
it.



I have two critical questions.



1. Does anyone know how to run an “fsck” of the device from say a bootable
floppy? Or even a bootable DVD – neither of which I have at the moment on
location.



2. Does anyone in the country (or better yet in Northern New Jersey” have a
SCO machine?   One that we could attach this drive to in order to run an
“fsck” on it?  It might take some other machinations to accomplish this,
like adding a hard drive if there isn’t one to allow us to attach this
device to… or whatever it might take to get this simple job done?



3. I know, I said a couple questions, but is there a way to do a file
system clean from any Linux machine, or even a Windows machine?  I’m kind
of doubting it, but maybe, who knows?  That’s whyt I’m asking…



Any help is much appreciated, as the company is completely down until we
can figure out a way to get this primary drive working again!



I can be reached at 941.773.1544… or you can respond to this message, and
the sender (Jason Garner) will get the info right back to me.



If someone is in the Northern NJ area, we will drive the device to your
location… elsewhere, we will Fedex the drive, or a copy of it to you…. Or
some such.



Thanks in advance.



/John"



-- 
Jason Garner
Systems Administrator

1801 Oberlin Rd, Suite 204
Middletown, PA 17057
Work   223-246-3100 x 1139
Mobile 717-645-3521
<tim.barr at evalsvs.com>jason.garner at evalsvs.com
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