I'm running 1.3.2 on an AlphaStation 250, and I have several 9 Gb SCSI
disks currently on Ultrix 4.2A DECstations that I need to move over to
the AlphaStation while preserving their contents. The disks were set
up using the Ultrix 4.2A chpt, newfs, and fsirand. They each have six
ufs partitions, including an 'a' root partition starting at offset
zero (it would be ok if the root partition wasn't preserved, though).

I am able to mount Ultrix disk filesystems on the AlphaStation when
running Digital Unix 3.2C, as long as I follow the Digital Unix
documentation for doing this (run fsck and set the superblock
interleave and npsect values to the default). With NetBSD/alpha, the
disklabel program finds no disk label on the Ultrix disk. (I have
heard that Ultrix doesn't use a disk label format compatible with
NetBSD, although Digital Unix disk labels are compatible with NetBSD.)

Is there a way to mount filesystems from these disks on NetBSD/alpha
without losing the data (and preferably leaving each disk in a state
such that its filesystems could later be mounted again on Ultrix)?

In case it's relevant, it wouldn't ever be necessary to be able to
boot the NetBSD machine from one of the Ultrix disks.

Would I need to modify sys/arch/alpha/alpha/disksubr.c to look for
Ultrix (chpt) partition tables, perhaps making use of code from the
compat_label function in sys/arch/pmax/pmax/disksubr.c ?

Matt Power
mhpower@mit.edu