Dumping Images of my VAX-11/730's Drives?

Savesets produced using VMS BACKUP are the ideal way to archive your VMS system. They will save everything you need in a format which can be restored onto any disk big enough to hold the data, selectively if necessary, while dealing with any errors on the input or output media. BACKUP can be run standalone or under VMS. If you get TCP/IP networking like Multinet (ie not like CMUIP) running, you should be able to use FTP, rcp or maybe even TFTP to move a VMS BACKUP saveset to another system. The snag is you need enough scratch space to create the saveset on the 11/730 before you transfer it. C-Kermit for VMS might be able to do this - I can't recall. If you mount /foreign your non-system disk, it should be accessible at a logical block level instead of at a file level. VMS BACKUP won't like this but COPY should just copy logical blocks from the foreign mounted device. This probably isn't very useful to you but rcp or FTP PUT might also similarly cope with a foreign mounted devices and this may be another way of generating a raw dump of the device, provided there are no errors on it. (There may be issues detecting the size of the device and the operation may end with an error when no more blocks can be read. If whatever software you use doesn't try to discard it's output on encountering an error, all should be well.) However, you can't mount your system disk /foreign. Another way would be to write some code (VAX MACRO assembly / C / FORTRAN / BASIC or whatever compiler you have to use VMS system services like SYS$ASSIGN and SYS$QIO to read logical blocks from the disks and do something sensible when errors are encountered. This might involve a steep learning curve and the results will probably not be as well optimised to the task as VMS BACKUP. It should be possible to find some sample code to do something like this. Clustering is pretty simple when you know how but if you don't want to get into configuring a cluster, a DECnet connected system or emulated system would probably be the way to go. Configuring DECnet on VMS can be done very easily with surprisingly little understanding of what is going on and is less invasive than configuring a cluster. On VMS, any file, including a BACKUP saveset can be specified as being located on a remote DECnet node, so it is possible to run BACKUP on your 11/730 and have the output saveset situated on a different VAX / Alpha / Itanium / emulated system running VMS or on a unix or other system capable of running DECnet well, (ultrix?), even a PC/Macintosh running DOS/Windows/Macos and DEC Pathworks. If your 11/730 is already configured to be a cluster member (if it says something like "Waiting to form or join a VAXcluster" on the console at boot time and then pauses for while before continuing) then you probably don't have to do anything further to it to make it function as part of a cluster. The only experimentation required would be on the additional cluster member, which could be an emulated system using simh for example if you don't have any other suitable hardware available. Once you are clustered, you can access disks on a remote cluster node as if they were local. Clustering with an emulated system would be especially suitable for producing raw block copies of the disks on the 11/730 on the filesystem of the system hosting the emulation. Regards, Peter Coghlan.