[HECnet] Copying RL02 image under RSX

[Clem Cole]

Below

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Bob Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
   FWIW, the pack is from an ancient Unix and is not in Files11, RT11, or any other format that RSX knows about.
Given it's from an ancient UNIX system, why not let UNIX do the work?   What model PDP-11 is it and I assume is has an ethernet if it's on the DECnet?

I'd just fire up a minimal *BSD for the PDP11 [which has ethernet drivers] and then   do something in the scheme of:

        dd if=/dev/[raw RL device]   ibs=20480  obs=1b | [rs]sh some_remote_host dd ibs=1b obs=20480  of=diskimage

Once you have it in a file, you can mount diskimage in simh on get the data you want using whatever OS or system you like.

Note you might want set the ibs=1b and add  conv=sync,noerror  to minimize effects of bad blocks, since you are more interested in saving data then speed.    You'll want to log/save away the console log so you know where the bad blocks are, since they will show up in the results as blocks of zeros.

Clem

We used the trick a couple of years ago, al biet was saving a bootable (DOS11) tape of an ancient UNIX file system.    Worked like a charm.    Warren Toomey now has the resulting bits on his PDP  heritage  site.