I have a physical disk from a HPUX system that I need to access from a Debian Linux for ia64 system. From the hpux-lvm-tools project I have the tools to access the HPUX LVMs (Linux LVM has a different format) and I also have the freevxfs driver.

I know beforehand that the disk has three partitions, and that the biggest one contains LVM volumes, and some of those are VxFS filesystems.

I can see the partitions:

# cat /proc/partitions

major minor  #blocks  name

   8       32  143374744 sdc
   8       33     512000 sdc1
   8       34  142452736 sdc2
   8       35     409600 sdc3

It finds a VG in one of the disk partitions:

# ./vgscan_hpux
On /dev/sdc2 - vg1328874723

# ./pvdisplay_hpux /dev/sdc2

PV General Information
----------------------
VG Creation Time        Fri Feb 10 12:52:03 2012
Physical Volume ID      1766760336 1328874723
Volume Group ID         1766760336 1328874723
Physical Volumes in VG  1766760336 1328874723
VG Actication Mode      0 - LOCAL
PE Size                 64 MBs

Lvol sizes
----------
lvol1 - 8 Extents - 512 MBs
lvol2 - 192 Extents - 12288 MBs
lvol3 - 16 Extents - 1024 MBs
  ...
lvol21 - 13 Extents - 832 MBs
lvol22 - 224 Extents - 14336 MBs
lvol23 - 16 Extents - 1024 MBs

Then I activate that VG and some new devices appear in my system:

# ./pvactivate_hpux /dev/sdc2
VG vg1328874723 Activated succesfully with 23 lvols.
#
# ll /dev/mapper/
total 0
crw------- 1 root root 10, 59 Nov 26 16:08 control
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Nov 26 16:38 vg1328874723-lvol1 -> ../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Nov 26 16:38 vg1328874723-lvol10 -> ../dm-9
  ...
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Nov 26 16:38 vg1328874723-lvol8 -> ../dm-7
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 Nov 26 16:38 vg1328874723-lvol9 -> ../dm-8

But:

# mount /dev/mapper/vg1328874723-lvol18 /mnt/tmp
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
# mount -t vxfs /dev/mapper/vg1328874723-lvol18 /mnt/tmp
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/vg1328874723-lvol18,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

# lsmod |grep vxfs
freevxfs               23905  0

I also tried to identify the raw data with the file command and it just says 'data':

# file -s /dev/mapper/vg1328874723-lvol18
/dev/mapper/vg1328874723-lvol18: symbolic link to `../dm-17'
# file -s /dev/dm-17
/dev/dm-17: data
#

Any clues?