VAX’d: Data recovery from a legacy VAX VMS system

My talk will give a little background of myself and start detailing a data recovery job that some friends and I worked on. We were approached and during our initial talks they admitted they didn’t really know what kind of system they had, but we needed to get the data off of it. They thought it was a linux system, like RedHat or something. Turns out it was a specialized VM that emulated a hardware VAX VMS system so we had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into. I will go into detail on some initial impressions and observations and the methodology we used to begin extracting the data off of this system. We ended up successfully mounting the virtualized RAID array and copying off the data. It turned out that the LKM we used did not properly decode the data, so we had to write some extra software to convert it into a usable format.

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