15 Jan
2010
15 Jan
'10
5:25 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Jerome H. Fine <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> wrote:
I have a question???? ?I would like to use them as an interchange between
the DEC ?PDP-11/83 and the PC running Windows XP. ?My experience
with Windows 98SE was that the drive would NOT be recognized (not
be available to be used) if there was not a Windows type "format" for
the drive - which in DEC terms means a format and initialization.
If you boot your Windows XP system with the SCSI drive attached and
run Disk Management (type diskmgmt.msc in a command prompt window) and
if the drive shows up there you should be able to do a raw read or
write of the drive without there being a recognized filesystem on the
drive or a drive letter assigned to the drive. If you get a prompt
about needing to write a signature to the drive you want to cancel
that.
I wrote some simple code to do a raw read or write of a SCSI drive by
modifying the SCSI Pass Through Interface sample in the Windows Driver
Kit. I did this specifically so I could write a disk image generated
using SIMH to a physical SCSI disk to use with a physical PDP-11.
There must be other free tools out there for doing raw reads or writes
of disks when running Windows. I didn't bother looking for any as it
was just as easy to write my own.
If what you really want to do is access the physical SCSI disk
directly from the simulator when running Windows instead of creating
an image of the physical disk first and then accessing the disk image
from the simulator, that would depend on whether the
simulator
supported doing that.
-Glen