24 Nov
2013
24 Nov
'13
9:12 a.m.
On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Mark G Thomas <Mark at misty.com> wrote:
So my 11/53 just arrived, and my 11/73 is on it's way, both in BA23 chassis.
Inventory of the 11/53 is:
KDJ11-D/S CPU
Dataram 4093 with 2MB RAM
RQDX3 controller
- If I wanted to get bsd2.11 running on either of
these, do I need an
additional board with some kind of RTC, or some other hardware than I
already have? (I see comments about an MXV11-B, at least for 11/23 users?)
Is your M7554 KDJ11-D 11/53 the 512KB version or the 1.5MB version?
With an additional 2MB RAM card you should be good. With the 2
on-board SLU interfaces at a minimum the only other thing you need is
a suitable storage controller and storage device to run 2.11BSD.
If you have a working M7555 RQDX3 but no hard drive the challenge
would be to find a working RD54 or equivalent, and then the next
challenge would be to get a 2.11BSD image on the hard drive. If you
also had a tape controller and tape drive you could do things the
traditional way and boot from tape and install 2.11BSD from tape. If
you have lots of patience you might be able to create a disk image
using SIMH or another PDP-11 emulator and then transfer that image to
the real hardware disk through the serial interface. I have never
attempted that myself.
The easiest way is find a Q-Bus SCSI controller. With something like
a CMD CQD-200 or CQD-220 you could connect both a SCSI hard drive and
a SCSI tape drive. I have installed 2.11BSD using CMD SCSI
controllers and Exabyte 8MM SCSI tape drives numerous times. Or you
can also create the disk image on an emulator and then 'dd' the image
to the SCSI disk from a PC host.
- Is there some kind of diagnostics I can perhaps use
PUTR to copy onto
a bootable floppy, that would do further hardware tests? I'm not even
clear if the ROM power-on memory test is thorough
If you haven't already discovered this yourself, you should start with
the XXDP diagnostics.
http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp11/discimages/rl02/
xxdp25.rl02.gz
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/xxdp/
PDP11_DiagnosticHandbook_1988.pdf
If you boot the XXDP 2.5 RL02 disk image in SIMH or another PDP-11
emulator you should then be able to create a bootable RX-33 floppy
image and copy a subset of the diagnostics that are relevant for your
hardware configuration to the image, and then create a physical floppy
from that image to boot on your real hardware.
For example there is the OKDD?? diagnostic specific to the M7554
KDJ11-D 11/53 and the OKDA?? diagnostic specific to the M8190 KDJ11-B
11/73, and various memory diagnostics.
-Glen