Copy Xenix system to virtual box

[boerbokrib]

Hi

Can you possibly point me in the right direction? posts or help.

I have a friend that has an old xenix system with a program that controls his inventory. He is pretty old an technically challenged. It has started giving him hassles. He asked me to help as i have some unix experience.

i have managed to get xenix running on a virtual box. but now how do i copy his old system that has no tcip just serial and a floppy disk to the virtual environment?

is this possible?

 

[iainmaoileoin]

I am very rusty on Xenix.
What volume of data do you have to move?
Just a floppy or two, or is it Megabytes of programs too?

How about slip and a long weekend? I seem to remember that the xenix boxes had a solid teletype driver that did "proper" serial h/w handshake.

Does the old box have a floppy? A GoTEK "solid-state" floppy and the usb stick that fits in them?

 

[Uniballer]

What kind of hard disk does the Xenix system have? I would probably be looking for a way to pull the hard disk out of the Xenix box and read the whole thing to a suitable disk image on another machine.

What kind of hardware are we talking about here? ISA bus? PCI bus? SCSI hard disk? IDE?

 

[Chuck(G)]

You didn't say which Xenix that you're using, but we'll assume that it's at least R4.0V2.1.

If I wanted to use floppies, I'd use cpio to create the floppy disks.

If I wanted to use the serial port, I'd set up a a null modem cable and then use uucp to perform the transfer. There are windows versions (the last I looked) of uucp (e.g. UUPC).

 

[SomeGuy]

And are we talking about IBM PC Xenix? It was available for a few different platforms. Although a high-level application might not care as long as it is x86.

 

[Caluser2000]

Here are some manuals that might be useful http://www.tenox.net/docs/

 

[boerbokrib]

Hi problem solved i used clonezilla on a system that had an old ide interface and booted off the cd created an image of the disk to a usb device. I then created a virtual machine in virtual box. booted clonezilla cd in virtual environment and then restored the image as easy as that.

now i just need to somehow get the xenix to see the usb serial interface.

some playing to go.

 

[md95065]

Xenix won't see a USB interface - USB didn't show up until the mid 1990's, at least 5 years after the last Xenix release.

Assuming that this was a PC Xenix system (rather that ran on OEM specific hardware) then it should be happy if you configure your virtual machine with a couple of standard COM ports (ie something that looks like a 16450 or 16550 UART).