[HECnet] RSTS/E under simh

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On May 15, 2014, at 5:14 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:

On Thu, 15 May 2014, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons wrote:


El 15/05/2014, a les 5.15, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> va escriure:


The RZ25 didn't have the disk to copy the image I had ready.

Thankfully...it failed (apparently something went short as it being plugged in makes the VAX /fail to power on/) so I can use my 526M drive!

Hi Cory,

I'm perhaps a little bit late catching this train, but... what was the original problem you are trying to solve using this kind of hardware sorcery? Your first post mentioned something along you being unable to install RSTS/E under simh from tape... could you be more specific? I have a running RSTS/E installation which I built from an install tape, and perhaps I could help you to fix the initial problem which triggered all this disk size/connection/style thing...


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.

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.   

	paul