OS-9 login / shutdown

[OS-9 Al]

> I've just come across my first OS9 system, and know absolutely  
> nothing about
> OS9 other than that it's vaguely UNIX-like. Before I try hooking  
> the hard disk
> up and seeing if it actually works, obvious questions follow:
>
> 1) I assume there's a login process. Of course I don't know any  
> account
> details for the system; are there any tricks to breaking in as  
> there often are
> with old UNIX systems?

The stock "login" utility provided by Microware was very, very basic  
(not even encrypted passwords; it was designed just as a front end  
for selecting user IDs for the super user).  An example /dd/sys/ 
password file would have "super" for the user name, and "user" for  
the password.  You could even type them both at the login prompt:

Login? super user

But no one should have ever shipped a system with that in place ;-)

> 2) Assuming I can't log in at this stage, is it possible to cleanly  
> shut the
> system down? e.g. some magic keypress or login name (as there is  
> with Apollo
> machines)

Power off at will!  OS-9 was designed for embedded use and except for  
potential disk caching issues if you powered down during a write,  
there is no "shutdown" sequence for OS-9.

> 3) If I can login somehow, how do I then shut the system down  
> properly? Is
> there a shutdown command in OS9, or is it something else entirely?

Not needed :-)  Just make sure nothing is writing to the disk.

> On the plus side, the interface between host and disk unit is SASI,  
> so there's
> a chance I can do a raw backup of the drive via a modern system. On  
> the minus
> side, the physical drive is an ST506 type via an OMTI bridge board,  
> so I can't
> easily go from raw backup to working system without proper low- 
> level format
> utils (which I don't have, although I'm still sorting through  
> floppies that
> came in the same haul)

You can do a web search and find disk utilities for PC and maybe  
Linux (and maybe Mac) that will read/write to an OS-9 disk image.

> Of course all of this assumes that a) the hard drive isn't toast  
> already and
> b) that the hard drive which came in the pile of stuff actually  
> belongs with
> this system in the first place :)

You can also find the OS-9 Technical I/O manual online at the CD-i  
Association website (netsearch; I don't know the address) and it has  
the disk structure in there.  Worst case: disk zapper ;-)

		-- Allen
		http://os9al.com