11/93 rebuild

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed May 29 16:01:12 CDT 2019


    > From: Holm Tiffe

    >> The "--list" command to 'dd' gives a whole bunch of stuff:

    > aha:
    > $ dd --list
    > dd: unknown operand --list

I was talking about the program I had mentioned in the previous email, "dd
for Windows". The "--list" command to it produced that long list of devices
(the list you edited out of the reply), so it definitely works there.


    > Nobody in a PDP11 is interested what Windows thinks about partitions.

Understood, but in my previous email I had given an example using a uSloth
partition:

   >> dd-removable if=UnixRoot of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 count=4872 seek=131072

so when your reply mentioned "partitions" ("You have to have an already
existing parition structure on the disk") it was natural to assume you meant
those - especially since there was a plausible reading of your comment
involving them (i.e. 'does "dd for Windows" only work on a disk with an
existing uSloth partition structure on it').


    > Most of the PDP11 SCSI Controllers could build two or more PDP11 disks
    > out of one physical device. That is what I meant with partition in this
    > case .. There is some logical information on the device, you simply
    > don't get the entire raw device on the pdp as you possibly think.

That's a good point, and perhaps there's no existing way to write a SCSI disk
from a Windoze box in a way that the PDP11 SCSI controllers can grok. I don't
know enough about how they work to answer that.


    > Tapes have no such restrictions

Right, but one has to have a tape drive; the OP may not.

       Noel


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