[HECnet] RSTS/E under simh

[Dave McGuire]

On 05/15/2014 05:28 PM, 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.

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.

  Are you certain that this is the only limitation?   I've had the
crash-on-boot problems when they were off by quite a bit less than a
power of two.   Since I found that problem the hard way, I always make
images (via simh "rauser=<n>") using the exact size of the target
physical disk.

                          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA