20 May
2011
20 May
'11
3:08 p.m.
As was mentioned, vtserver really does work pretty well... although it
is slow at 9600 baud.
I have transfered XXDP, RSTS and RT-11 to blank RL02 this way and then
boot the machine from those. I prepare the images in SIMH and the
resulting .dsk image file is what you transfer with vtserver.
vtserver documentation talks a lot about unix but it works fine for
bootstrapping these other OS too.
Chris
(PDP-11/34A with (2) RL02 and MSCP SCSI w/ dual ZIP drives)
On Friday (05/20/2011 at 09:21AM -0400), Jerome H. Fine wrote:
--
Chris Elmquist
Doug Jackson
wrote:
Hi everybody,
I am sure that this has been solved, but I can't see a single cohesive way
of doing it so I thought I would ask.
I have a PDP11/04, with a RL01 disk drive. Ther are real physical hardware
(about 40Kg each....)
The hardware now operates - I can boot the custom software that is on one of
the RL01 disk packs. It boots and displays "SYS5 READY~" then hangs - The
system was used for a race track display board, so some of the custom
hardware is not there.
There are a couple of other packs that I have verified that don't boot, so
what I would love to do is to load some useful software (RT11 or Basic or
Forth....).
I can not figure out how to actually do that - I have simulated images for
SIMH, and can get SIMH to actually boot RT11, but I can't figure out how to
actually move the data onto the nice, big, physical disk...
Can somebody provide some advice?
Doug
(In sunny Canberra, Australia)
Normally, you must start with RT-11 already on the RL01
pack along with Kermit or some other method of making file
transfers. Since you are essentially starting with a blank RL01
pack, this poses a problem.
Since you are so far away, the postage to send an RL01 pack
with RT-11 would be expensive - and I don't have one in any case.
One possibility is that you are actually booting RT-11, just that
you don't know it. This is unlikely if your system hangs and you
can't use <CTRL/C> to get back to RT-11. On the other hand,
the user application program which is running may have disabled
the <CTRL/C> abort capability. One way to test that is to boot
the custom software, then IMMEDIATELY start to enter
<CTRL/C>
as fast as and as many times as possible to prevent that
"SYS5 READY~"
message. If RT-11 has actually been used and <CTRL/C>
abort has not already been disabled, then you may see the
RT-11 "." prompt and be able to enter other commands.
It make not always work, so try this a few times before you
give up.
Let us know if that happens.
Otherwise, I suspect that the solution might be to enter a
program using ODT to copy a program to the RL01. This
would not be too difficult, but you would need to write the
program under SIMH and test it, then enter it via ODT
on the PDP-11/04.
Another solution would be to find a Unibus host adapter and
load the software under SIMH to a SCSI hard drive. The
SCSI hard drive might be inexpensive, but Unibus SCSI host
adapters are very expensive.
Can I help in some other way.
Jerome Fine