>>>> "Zane" == Zane H Healy
<healyzh at aracnet.com> writes:
> So tell me, what are the really cool methods to
transfer data
> between a PC and a real PDP11 at a reasonable speed? SCSI
> controller and SCSI disk? Something else? Ethernet?
>
> Or is a backup over serial line a normal thing...?
Zane> It helps that I have SCSI Controllers on my operational
Zane> PDP-11's. I use removable disk trays that allow me to move the
Zane> HD's between PDP-11's, and more importantly to hook them up to
Zane> a Unix box, at which point I can use 'dd' to back them up. The
Zane> resulting disk images can be accessed via SIMH, E11, or burned
Zane> to a CD-R and accessed on the real PDP-11 HW. I've managed to
Zane> boot and install RT-11, RSX-11M, and RSX-11M+ from CD-R. I've
Zane> yet to figure out how to do that with RSTS/E.
If the CD-R is on a controller RSTS understands (MSCP is the only
option I can think of for this) and is formatted with the RSTS file
structure, and has a boot block in sector zero, it should all just
work.
I haven't personally done this but I'm pretty sure it was done by one
of my friends. I even have some weird "hybrid file system" hacks in
RSTSFLX to let you create a CD-R that's partly ISO and partly RTST,
and bootable. I believe that was used and shown to work, though I
never saw the results.
If you have the files, RSTSFLX can make a bootable disk image for you,
so you can try this yourself.
paul