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Mounting EFS (Irix) partitions from Gentoo MIPS LiveCD?
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ozbird
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 08, 2006 9:21 am    Post subject: Mounting EFS (Irix) partitions from Gentoo MIPS LiveCD? Reply with quote

A friend of mine has bought an old SGI Indy box, with Irix installed on the hard disk.
I suggested that they get the experimental MIPS LiveCD so they can poke around without breaking anything. :)
While it appears to boot correctly, but they can only mount the disk partitions read-only. (They tried using "-o rw", but no luck.)

Is there a trick to getting EFS partitions mounted read-write?
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Redhatter
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 2:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Linux doesn't support writing to EFS partitions. Hence -o rw doesn't work.
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Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter, VK4MSL)
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ozbird
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Redhatter wrote:
Linux doesn't support writing to EFS partitions. Hence -o rw doesn't work.

I had a feeling that might be the case. Luckily, read-write access wasn't required to liberate the box.
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Kumba
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 6:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Gentoo/MIPS SGI LiveCD doesn't use EFS partitions -- it's similar in design to what an IRIX install CD might be (with disk partitions and all), but it has an ext2 partition on it instead. That's where the CD loads everything from. IRIX only uses EFS on its own install CD sets. The filesystem used in an IRIX install is XFS - and Linux should have read/write support for that. The thing that I know of is that if the IRIX filesystem was uncleanly mounted (Due to a power failure or whatnot), you won't be able to do much with it under Linux because Linux's XFS implementation apparently can't deal with unclean XFS partitions. This may manifest itself in strange ways, like the partition being read-only, or just not mounting at all.


--Kumba
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Blood Fluke
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 2:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ozbird wrote:
Redhatter wrote:
Linux doesn't support writing to EFS partitions. Hence -o rw doesn't work.

I had a feeling that might be the case. Luckily, read-write access wasn't required to liberate the box.


For future reference, anything old enough to be using an EFS root will never require read-write access to change the password. IRIX 5.x and earlier used UNIX crypt as their password hash. It's so weak that a modern computer can brute force it with John the Ripper in a matter of minutes.
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