[daip] AIPS data recovery question

[Samuel Conner]

To Whom it may concern,

  I am writing with an unusual problem.

  I have a 15JAN94 AIPS installation on an old SPARC 5 (running an early version of Solaris) that recently died. The death was due to a failure in the internal hard drive from which the machine boots. All of my user data and programs were on external drives which are still working, and in fact I can see all of this data after moving these drives to a 2nd Sparcstation which I also have. That machine was intended to serve mostly as a "dumb terminal" and does not have certain system software components which were on the first machine.

  I am having a problem running AIPS on this 2nd machine, however, due to some sysadmin problems which I have not yet resolved (and may not be able to). I can log into this machine as root and I can see the data and an external tape drive which I propose to use to transfer the data to another machine,

  I have a lot of "work in process" on these drives, most of it in the internal AIPS data format, and I would like to move the AIPS data files to another machine (a Linux laptop on which I have recently installed 31DEC03 AIPS).

I am contemplating two alternate routes to accomplishing the data transfer and I seek counsel from a person wiser than I am.

A) I believe that I have all of the 15JAN94 source code and I still have the 15JAN94 installation guide. I could try to recompile and relink 15JAN94 AIPS on my new machine, in a separate directory tree from my 31DEC03 installation. Then, from within the reconstituted 15JAN94 installation, I could FITTP all the the data to disk FITS files and then import them into the 31DEC03 installation. This seems to me like a robust path, provided that I can get the 15JAN94 version to compile and link with my 2003 Linux installation.

B) I am aware that the old HEX system for numbering "extensions" was replaced some years ago by an Extended-HEX system to permit more extensions for each file. There was a procedure, a conversion utility, for converting the old HEX-numbered files to the new extended HEX-numbered files.

  Is that conversion utility still available in 31DEC03? If it is, could I simply clear out all the data areas of my 31DEC03 installation (which has nothing in it other than the DDT and Y2K data sets), copy all the data from my current 15JAN94 AIPS data areas (DA00 through DA05) into corresponding 31DEC03 areas and then run this utility for each user number?

  Alternately, could I install 31DEC03 over my old 15JAN94 installation, using the same data areas as that old installation, and then run the conversion utility?

  My fear is that the conversion utility was supported only during a limited range of AIPS releases. I may be a dinosaur.
  ---------

As I said, this is an unusual inquiry. Thanks for your thoughts on this problem.

Sincerely yours,

Sam Conner