29 Sep
2011
29 Sep
'11
9:47 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-
bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of joe heck
Sent: 29 September 2011 14:38
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Migration from VAX 3100 to SIMH questions and looking for ideas
Hi,
Our 3100 is dying. Thinking of running SIMH. Big stumbling block is how
to
move the OS and files. I've used Kermit when
I've done this for RT11, but
that seems like torture for 8 Gb on two disks. Can't I just stick in a
SCSI
controller and use something like ODS2 to read the
SCSI drive and put them
into the new container? Thinking of using (probably) XP or Windows7.
Am I missing something here?
And, if I read it correctly, the only device that talks to the outside
world is
the ethernet connection in SIMH-vax. Well, that will
take care of pretty
much everything, I guesss, since we only have printers and terminals, and
I
can switch over to PCs with VT100 software.
Anybody been through this already and have some pointers?
thanks in advance
Joe Heck
Hmmm... SIMH does not support SCSI disks and so I *think* you can't have 4GB
virtual disks in SIMH. Also SIMH only emulates the 3900 and the 780, so
other hardware that the OS expects may not be there either. Depending on
what is wrong with your 3100, an easy way to get files across is to get SIMH
running and use DECnet to transfer files, perhaps by creating a backup
saveset and transferring that to SIMH and restoring from the backup saveset.
One other thing you might consider is booting the 3100 off the network so
you can create an image backup of the whole OS disk which you can then
transfer over DECnet and restore on SIMH, but I think that may have disk
size problems, and perhaps problems with mismatched hardware if you try to
copy the OS.
As this seems to be a commercial situation, perhaps Charon VAX is an option,
that may support more stuff than SIMH (I have never used it so I don't know
at all, just speculating).
Regards
Rob