[HECnet] Copying RL02 image under RSX

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-07-12 00:51, Bob Armstrong wrote:
    I have an RL02 pack and a RSX system and I want to 1) copy a sector
by sector image of the RL02 to a 20480 block file and then b) mount a
new pack, BAD it, and then copy the same image back to the new pack.   On
VMS I   d just use COPY /DEVICE or maybe BACKUP /PHYSICAL, but I   m having
a tough time figuring out the RSX equivalent.

    I thought PIP would do it, (   PIP FOO.IMG=DL0:   ) but that fails if the
disk isn   t mounted or if it   s mounted as /FOREIGN.       I don   t think BRU
or DSC understand non-ODS volumes, and I don   t know any other utilities
that copy files.

    FWIW, the pack is from an ancient Unix and is not in Files11, RT11,
or any other format that RSX knows about.

    Otherwise my only choice will be to fire up the 730 so I can get an
RL02 attached to a real operating system J

Eh... BAD is a BAD idea in this case. The problem with RL packs is that bad blocks are not hidden, but very visible. And the list of bad blocks are actually written on a disk block. The device driver does not do anything will the bad block information. Instead it is the file system initialization code which reads in the bad block list from the pack, and they allocate all the bad blocks on the pack to the [0,0]BADBLK.SYS file, so that they are not used by any other file.

BAD in turn only updates the bad block list on the pack, and do nothing else. This is why these packs reserve the last track. That is where the bad block list is expected to reside, along with pack serial number.

So if copy pack A to pack B, and you have bad blocks on pack A, they will also be marked as bad blocks on pack B, while if you have bad blocks on pack B, they will be forgotten.

All that said, if you are running the latest version of RSX, the easiest way of copying is to use VCP.
All that said, I think that BRU can also do the work, although I have not played with that.
But check the /IMAGE switch to BRU...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol