[HECnet] RSTS/E is really picky

[Cory Smelosky]

On Tue, 20 May 2014, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

Could you explain what you wanted to do, what steps you followed, and what exactly the trouble is?


I staged RSTS/E in SIMH before copying its disk image to the real PDP-11/23.

It kept complaining about the pack size and whatnot...but I think I might have finally made progress.

BOOT DU1 . ARE YOU SURE? yes
WAIT...
?
?RU0: timeout during initialization, step 000003 - device disabled.
RU0: failed during units lookup - device disabled.

Fatal RSTS/E system initialization error!
Disk DU1: is hung

PC=120400 PS=030340 OV=000006 M5=004000 M6=004200 SP=041236
R0=000001 R1=000026 R2=042125 R3=000016 R4=000001 R5=041350

Progress!

If you feed a disk to RSTS that doesn   t have a RSTS file system on it, it will get confused/annoyed.   The error message you quoted is an example of what you would see.


Ahhhhh.   I see.   I was copying the disk incorrectly then.

Given an uninitialized disk, you use the disk initialization procedure (from INIT or online).   The dialog   you showed does that.   After that procedure, you   ll have a RSTS format disk.


Okay.

Partitioning?   RSTS doesn   t have partitions.   The whole physical drive is a single file system.   It also doesn   t depend on NVRAM (PDP11s traditionally have none).


My controller is splitting a 2G drive in to 4 ~500M drives.   It appears the config is stored in its NVRAM.

Block 0 is the boot block (dummy    not bootable    boot block by default).   Boot 1 is the superblock (   pack label   ).   For new (V9 or later) disks that points to the MFD (top level directory); for old disks (format 0.0) it is the first block of the [1,1] directory which doubles as MFD on that layout.

	paul



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Cory Smelosky
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