[HECnet] RSTS/E under simh

[Cory Smelosky]

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.

If the replacement    disk    is a fair amount larger,    clean    (   disk rebuild   ) which is RSTS    fsck    may complain that the free cluster bitmap file is too small.   That won   t prevent reading but it will make the disk read-only.


It gives an initialisation error about it being > a power of 2.

	paul


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Cory Smelosky
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