[HECnet] RSTS/E under simh

[Dave McGuire]

On 05/15/2014 05:41 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2014, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:


On May 15, 2014, at 5:34 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:

On Thu, 15 May 2014, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:


First I need to find the exact size of the drive so I can set an
RAUSER to it.   I can then install RSTS/E *IF* I can get SIMH to
boot and install from the RSTS/E V10.1 tape (which I can't get it
to do).

You mean you have a real drive, and you want to copy it to a disk
image file and configure that as an RA file of user-specified size? 
That will work fine.   RSTS can handle disks of any size up to a
limit (the RP07 is somewhat below that limit, I   d have to dig a bit
to find the actual number).   If you can just dd the disk to a file,
that file should serve.


I want to copy an image to a real drive.

Alternatively, you can always use a larger disk so long as you don   t
cross a power of two.   RSTS addresses disks by    disk clusters    which
are 16 bit numbers, and the file system layout starts from a given
disk cluster size.   So if you have a pack with 70k sectors, you can
drop it into another pack of 90k sectors     but not in one of 130k
sectors because that one has a DCS double that of the original.


The problem is I have NO IDEA just how big this drive is.   Systems
tend to disagree about its size...I suppose I can sacrifice the RZ23
for this.

Find yourself a copy of my utility    rstsflx    and ask it to ident the
image.   It will tell you the file system information.   That will tell
you what sort of disk it can go onto.


I need the /physical/ drive size! Different systems give me different
sizes.

  This, of course, should not happen.   The host should query the drive
for its size, in blocks...I don't know why a given host OS would give
you different numbers.

  I see from private email that you had started up the command interface
on your Qbus SCSI host adapter.   Is there a "scan the bus" command or
something like that in there, that might tell you the drive size in
blocks, from the perspective of that controller?   Alternatively, what I
do (as I mentioned in private mail) is to boot 2.11BSD from a different
device and look at the ra<n> probe messages for the device size.

                          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA