Picked up an AS/400 today, any idea how to image the drives before I turn it on?
Posted by WG1GEM@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 77 comments
A buddy and I found an AS/400 listed on Facebook today. Given that neither of us have any impulse control and I seem we have more garage space than sense, we bought it!
Not knowing anything, but knowing enough about IBM to know that all of the licenses are stored on the hard disks, and the desks are questionably old, how would I go about taking a raw disk image of each of the disks in case anything should happen?
Doing some digging, it looks like the disks are all 80-pin SCSI. Anything USB based that I could use w/ a laptop to archive, or only PCI/PCIe-based options?
Also if anyone knows anything about these monsters, I’d love to chat!
chrisdc951@reddit
I wouldn't worry so much about that yet. Did you get wires with it or just the box. If you don't have one of these: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fstore.flagshiptech.com%2Fibm-21f5093-8-port-twinax-cable-as-400%2F%3Fsrsltid%3DAfmBOop92TuTYkOC9487CYAcLU3dCT9oNG0CnmxDk-03S81hJi-lgTy8&psig=AOvVaw1zDRJQ5mGVHGycGoIni8RD&ust=1755195072942000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBMQjRxqFwoTCNDr25exiI8DFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE you won't be able to do much with it. It's the cable you connect the terminals with. Did the as/400 come with an ethernet card. You can do terminal emulation on a pc but not for the main terminal. That requires a twinax connection to the box with the above cable. It may be that you bought a sidecar (ie: more storage) and not the real thing. If it just has fiber cards it is probably a sidecar. Anyway see if you can find an old 3179 or 3180. Pretty decent terminals that your 400 won't have any problems with. If you can do this remember the username: qsecofer which means "queue security officer". Most 400's I've dealt with people always forget to change the password. Which is a good thing for techs having to deal.
I know these things as i worked for a mid-range maintenance shop in California in the 90's
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Chatting in the iSeries discord, it almost seems like there isn’t a twinax card on this beast. It does have 3 Ethernet cards. It’s also got the 2850-011/285A board. I’ll try to upload a more complete set of photos when I get home from work.
chrisdc951@reddit
Great. Post some pictures of the back.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Photo of the connectors on the back
https://imgur.com/9cEgU3u
J11, RPO, DB9, Pin 1 Blocked
J14, UPS, DB9, Pin 3 Blocked
J8, UPS-CM, DB26
J19, M1, DB9
chrisdc951@reddit
Ok. Well, have a nice evening.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Okay, put together my pictures and sorted through/organized them out. It's definitely a full system.
I'm not sure what the "285A" board is in the FSIOA slot. Is *that* my twinax board?
chrisdc951@reddit
Look at the picture from my link. I don't remember the twinax block attaching to a card. It attaches to the back of the 400 is memory serves. You have to have a terminal on port 0 of the first block just to talk to the thing.
lwrscr@reddit
I have a few 400's 9401-150, 9406-170, and a 9406-520. they are fun but strange beasts. Given the nature of the proprietary firmware I've never tried to image the drives in mine, I just joined the 70 day club on all but the 9401 that will run V4Rx without license issues. That is a great looking system, best of luck with it!
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Interesting. Does your 170 have a twinax card? This one doesn’t appear to. Have you accessed yours without a twinax card via LAN only?
lwrscr@reddit
Yes it does, I've never used a LAN console with it, I wasn't sure if that generation supported it. We never used it on one back in the day I can remember. The cards can be found cheap on Ebay... the 5250 terminals however... The 520 is the only one that I use LAN console with.
Future-Side4440@reddit
that’s just a standard SCSI drive. The label says right in the very center SCSI SE, which means single ended, which is the standard type of interface used on 90% of servers.
from what I see on the top, if you remove it from the metal sled, it will have a standard large four pin molex power connector on the left side and probably a wide 68 pin SCSI connector on the right side.
The information in the bottom left corner is for a long row of jumpers for manually specifying various SCSI settings, such as the drive ID number using bits zero through three (0 to 15 decimal), should the spindle automatically start spinning (auto start), and should the drive provide automatic termination power, or just leave termination off if it will be installed in the middle of a long chain of devices on the SCSI bus.
Using a wide single ended SCSI controller with the 68 pin connector, you should be able to make a perfect block level image of the drive using dd on liinux.
Narrow SCSI is 50 pin and only supports 8 device IDs using bits 0-2.
Sjsamdrake@reddit
I used to work for ibm but not on as400. I seem to recall that as400 drives are formatted with 520 byte sectors instead of 512. Security bits of some sort.
CornerProfessional34@reddit
True and you can switch formats between 512 and 520 fairly easily on any device that can send low level SCSI commands. No good for keeping data intact obviously.
Future-Side4440@reddit
I thought I saw someone commenting about SCA 80, but I don’t find it now. although the sled looks like modern automatic configuration SCA 80 pin, it’s not a good idea to assume that’s what it actually is. Unless you can find some document that specifies that.
It would be really sad to plug it into a modern SCA 80 interface and discover too late that it’s actually something proprietary as the magic smoke goes out of the drive circuit board.
if trying to read it with a PC, avoid SCSI raid controllers, only use host bus adapters in non-raid initiator mode. A raid controller might see the non-standard block size and decide the drive is blank and needs to be formatted, without asking you first.
googling suggests maybe LSI 53C875/53C1010 HBA, or an industry standard Adaptec AHA-2940 from back in the day.
Irreligious_PreacheR@reddit
Wow! I used to work on one of those. A redundant pair.rebooted it once in 5 years.
elvelazco@reddit
I once shut down one when testing the UPS System at this local giant Supermarket and it was not working properly. I decided to do it before opening that risking a failure after operations started. After the Power down it took the pooe AS many hours to come bak up. The electric guys had not connected the System properly. Hero Of The Day.
chandleya@reddit
I had a twin 42RU pair that hard IPL’d mid-day due to a flaky NIC.
It’s my opinion these got their “bulletproof” legacy based on limited change and even less exposure. In reality they were fickle as fuck
Irreligious_PreacheR@reddit
You're not totally wrong. Everyone in the team was kinda terrified of the things. We had an operator for hire who'd come in and do the tricky stuff.
chandleya@reddit
And it was abundantly clear that operator was walking in eggshells
Irreligious_PreacheR@reddit
Nah they were as rough as guts.
DeepDayze@reddit
I remember doing a system save and an IPL on these like every month.
dogpupkus@reddit
Live Linux on a CD, attach another large drive, and run dd against the disks to an image file on the attached storage.
elvelazco@reddit
Nope. It won't work like that in this particular architecture. Very specific hardware, firmware and software. Very reliable, can be running up with no downtime for years and years.
ol-gormsby@reddit
AS400 drives have *very* specific firmware. I doubt that any x86 architecture would even detect them, or it would read it as unpartitioned.
2raysdiver@reddit
AS400 drives also used a 520 byte sector, instead of 512 bytes. And no, IF you could manage to connect it to a x86 PC or server, neither Windows, Linux, or even OS/2 would recognize the formatting.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
I was thinking maybe DDRescue could get a raw image of the drive assuming it shows up as some unknown block storage device
suckmyENTIREdick@reddit
It won't show up as an "unknown" block storage device. It's just a SCSI drive, much the same as any other.
(And regular dd will almost certainly do fine. Don't overthink this without good cause.)
cab0lt@reddit
It actually will show up as an unknown block device. Linux will refuse to allocate a sdX entry because of the odd sector size and firmware, but you can use sg_dd from sg3-utils to read and write them.
ol-gormsby@reddit
You'll need a SCSI interface to even detect the drive, and the drive firmware will be the biggest hurdle. It's designed as a SCSI interface talking to a PowerPC architecture and bus, and a proprietary operating system.
I think it's a good idea to grab an image before turning it on but it'll be quite the job. OTOH, IBM midrange and mainframe gear is exceptionally reliable - AS400s are designed to be turned on and left on for years.
ol-gormsby@reddit
r/ibmi and r/as400
midrange.com has forums.
It's unlike any operating system you've ever used. There are some surface similarities with *nix such as commands being abbreviated, but it pretty much stops there.
The commands kind of go like verb/adjective/noun
wrkactjob is "work with active jobs", somewhat like 'top' in linux.
wrk - work with
act - active
job - jobs
dsp - display
chg - change
IF you manage to get it to IPL (boot) and IF you get a sign-on screen and IF you can sign on, you'll get a menu and command line, it all flows from there. You'll get used to function keys again 😉
The file storage structure consists of libraries (folders) and files, with varying file sub-types such as physical files (data), logical files (physical files with an alternative index), source physical files (source code), binary objects, and so on.
Glad-Lobster-220@reddit
Man this takes me back. I was the sys admin for our AS400 at my first company I worked at. Wrkactjobs on the printer pipeline was an every day task.
elvelazco@reddit
dspactjob
pixelbart@reddit
Lol I had to do evening shifts because the incoming data from certain suppliers failed from time to time. So I had to wait until 20:00/8pm and see if the data appeared and if not, I had to do some wrkactjob magic until the data suddenly appeared. That, and printer jobs, and the yellowed terminal in the sysadmin office, are my only AS/400 memories.
DeepDayze@reddit
Workoutq I used a lot in my operator days to track the print output from jobs running. Oh yes WRKACTJOBS was another often used command to keep an eye on the batch jobs too. Kept another eye on the operator console for any error messages too.
AS/400s were fun and quirky machines and I've also operated some IBM big iron too like the 9672 and the famous 3090 mainframes!
ol-gormsby@reddit
Yes, it was first and last command every day. And many times in between.
xampl9@reddit
Will they need a 5250 terminal to use as an operators console?
My AS/400 knowledge dates back to the late 90’s and the switch to the PowerPC chips.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Trying to figure that one out. Sort of looking like it’s a solid maybe
2raysdiver@reddit
It depends on how old an AS/400 it is. If it is one of the old pre-RISC white AS/400s, then you'll need a dedicated 5350 terminal or terminal emulator, I think. You'll also be limited to V3R2 and older versions of the OS.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
It’s a 1998 date code, there’s no twinax card in it and no cards appear missing. What do you know about console over LAN?
2raysdiver@reddit
Just saw the second pic. It's one of the black boxes. You one of the earlier RISC-based systems. I don't recall if it was "System/i" or "eServer iSeries" at that time. You can do console over LAN via the HMC, but I don't know how to configure the HMC on those older boxes. My guess is you probably have one of the V4 OS releases. Did the previous owner provide you with any history? Did they say if it is in working condition?
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Updated a previous comment. I did not get any history on this thing. Bought it from a scrapper who got it from a business. Glad he didn't tear it down, it's at least giving me something to scratch my brain.
Good to know that I can console over LAN via the HMC. I've seen conflicting information elsewhere stating that I can use the lan console as the main terminal, and others that I can't or does that change depending what hardware revision I have?
PolarBear541@reddit
Later systems have the option for a hardware management console, which allows you to manage the system remotely. If that one doesn’t have that, you would need to attach a 5250 display up to the first port of the first Twinax controller. That’s reserved for the system console.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
No twinax controller on board. No seemingly-missing cards either.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Chatting on the ibmi discord, it seems like this thing may not have a twinax card??
It’s got 3 Ethernet cards though.
The combo of 2850-011 and 285A led me to a “windows on i” document
invokes@reddit
ibmi discord you say? What's the URL? Thanks.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
https://discord.com/invite/nNR6AZWaUU
ol-gormsby@reddit
There's a couple of possibilities - "Client Access" software on a PC is one. Getting a suitable version from IBM will be a challenge but someone on discord or midrange.com might have a copy.
You *might* be able to establish a connection with SSH.
There's a public AS400 (now called IBM i) at PUB400.com but I believe they're not accepting new subscriptions at the moment. I have an account, if you have specific questions about commands I might be able to help by looking them up.
elvelazco@reddit
I would suggest a full System backup/dump to a proper SCSI/LTO tape, a full dump will copy everything, down to the Operatimf System and licenses.
Hope you make it work!! Good Luck!!!
william_dog_trainer@reddit
This makes the most logical sense to me as well. Provided, of course, that this machine will actually IPL .
elvelazco@reddit
Maybe OP can Buy a cheap one from Ebay or Craigslist or borrow from another retro enthusiast.
As a former AS/400 Operator I can suggest this as the best practice for this task.
PolarBear541@reddit
The IBM iSeries is a beast all its own. The one on the picture is an early AS400. Disks are probably 35 or 70 GB units. If the unit has been off line for a while, it’s probably has an OS that is no longer supported. If it was never upgraded it would have OS400 V4Rx. Might have V5Rx, but my guess is that would be as far as it could be upgraded. The current version of the OS is 7.5 (IBM changed the format of their naming convention slightly).
If you were to power it up (IPL) you’re most likely to get a screen telling you your licenses are expired. To get a license, you have to be on supported versions of the hardware and software, and pay a yearly service agreement fee.
Some of the later iSeries can run Linux, Unix, etc. That one, if Linux is an option, I’d be surprised.
william_dog_trainer@reddit
That is cool! I didn't know the later iSeries could run Linux.
Thanks for thr info!
Low-Charge-8554@reddit
You most likely need a SCSI controller card ( Adaptec) https://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/02/11/scsi-on-windows-10-adaptec-aha-2940-adaptec-29xx-ultra-or-aic-7870-adaptec-78xx/
DeepDayze@reddit
Nice to go down the AS/400 rabbit hole :)
ethanjscott@reddit
I work on these and I’ve got nothing. Best bet is to boot it up and try to do a backup. That will make a full data save with the os.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Will that back up the mystical LICs? I’ve seen conflicting info on big blue helping recover licenses/media should something go wrong
ethanjscott@reddit
It will. It’s called a full system save
DeepDayze@reddit
Yes and that can ONLY be run when system is in a restricted state (which means all jobs and subsystems must be ended).
SeaworthinessFast399@reddit
Worked more than 30 years with that machine but retired now, but I follow this post for curiosity. The As/400 is the most closed system ever made. What do you want to do with it ? Hacking other AS/400 ? Just forget about the idea.
WG1GEM@reddit (OP)
Fuck around and find out, pretty much. Also the inner autist I mean nerd in me thinks big iron is cool 🤷♂️
chickenbarf@reddit
lol, i spent 2 years of my life trying to run away from an AS400, and here you got one on purpose
jk, thats pretty cool. I worked with one that looked just like it.
ArcherPublic6439@reddit
My local PD still uses that… I hated our cad system
gatofisch@reddit
Zuluscsi link + sca-50 pin adapter will do it over USB for a cheap price. Although as others have mentioned, a cheaper zuluscsi + initiator mode will also do it
OldGeekWeirdo@reddit
If you're running on a laptop and have figured out the interface, I'd give Clonezilla a try.
ol-gormsby@reddit
Worth trying yes, but I'd be surprised if the partition type is even available in clonezilla.
cowbutt6@reddit
If OP is just imaging the entire block device (i.e. /dev/sdX) with a view to writing it back unmodified to the original HDD in the event mess something up, I can't see that will matter.
The biggest challenges as I see it are a) finding an economic way of attaching SCSI drives to modern systems, and b) finding a compatible replacement HDD if the original one fails: hardware of this vintage often required drives to identify themselves in specific ways (i.e. running proprietary brand-specific firmware revisions) in order to be recognised by the original host system.
ol-gormsby@reddit
It's not a block device as people understand /dev/sdX to be. You can't just plug it into another non-AS400 system and expect to read it other than at a very low level, and given IBM firmware, you won't read it at all. It might show up as a non-specific device, but that's about it.
yes, the firmware is very specific. Put it this way - if it doesn't recognise an AS400 at the other end, it's just not going to respond to commands.
You need an 80-pin SCSI to interface. Plus a power supply. Then you need software to communicate to the IBM firmware on the drive.
I would be fascinated to see it happen, and double triple surprised if it's accessed from something other than as AS400.
cowbutt6@reddit
I'm aware that the AS/400 is a very unusual system by normal standards.
But I'd be similarly "double triple surprised" if a working HDD, attached to a compatible SCSI host adapter doesn't spin up and respond to normal SCSI read and write commands enough to read and write whole device images.
https://try-as400.pocnet.net/wiki/Copying_disks_with_Linux suggests this is indeed possible using sg_dd which can handle the AS/400's 520- or 522-byte sector sizes.
Being able to make much sense of those images without a working AS/400 system, I'm sure would require much more work (as would adapting an off-the-shelf HDD, SSD, or memory card to work in an AS/400, especially due to those non-industry standard sector sizes).
Stoney3K@reddit
If you dump the entire disk at a block level (so dd if=/dev/sdX of=\~/my_disk_image.img) there doesn't need to be any partitions on it. You can even do that with a blank, unformatted disk.
ol-gormsby@reddit
Yes, IFF you can get the IBM proprietary firmware to cooperate. You have to get the embedded controller to talk before you can access disk sectors.
Locked-down hardware was very very common in that era and it's still the case with systems like AS400 (IBM i) and their mainframes. Apart from reliability factors - and this gear is *very* reliable, there's the factor that IBM didn't want you substituting any old seagate or WD drive into their very pricey racks of proprietary hardware.
Stoney3K@reddit
Usually that proprietary firmware will check or authenticate with the host system to tell it it has some kind of unique ID. There's no need to re-invent a completely new protocol for SCSI hard drives, only to implement a lock-out to prevent other cheaper drives from being installed into an AS/400.
IBM didn't really care about the other way round because that would mean they sold more hard drives, even if they didn't go into an IBM system. So I would suspect that reading an IBM drive to dump the raw data would probably work, but putting a copy of that drive back into an AS/400 system if it's not an original IBM drive would not work.
NightmareJoker2@reddit
Get yourself an LSI or Adaptec PCIe SCSI HBA, and a GParted Live CD (or USB), and image the drives from there with GNU ddrescue.
davewongillies@reddit
I think you might be able to do it with a BlueSCSI in initiator mode https://bluescsi.com/docs/Initiator-Mode
OcotilloWells@reddit
What's on the back? Token Ring?
ol-gormsby@reddit
You *can* get TR adapters but they were initially twinax to green-screen 5250 terminals. Ethernet and token-ring adapters were made available after a while.
team_fondue@reddit
/r/ibmi has a discord. These things are a very different beast than most.
pinksystems@reddit
Several options. Go to eBay and search for: "Ratoc U2SCX USB to Ultra SCSI adapter". those aren't inexpensive, but in the results you'll see alternatives which are more affordable.