Looking for VAXSET Software Engineering Tools for VMS 4.x

On 10/05/2021 10:05, Malte Dehling wrote: I've only checked a couple of them under SIMH, so it would be helpful to know if I need to check my workflow or not. Please do. Thanks. In other news, I polished the MAR-1989 CONOLD, which looked very bad, to start with. Amazingly it buffed up quite nicely and then read surprisingly well: [ $ ddrescue -r5 -v /dev/sr1 CDROM-AG-NC67A-RE-1989-03-VMS-CONOLD.iso CDROM-AG-NC67A-RE-1989-03-VMS-CONOLD.map GNU ddrescue 1.23 About to copy 205199 kBytes from '/dev/sr1' to 'CDROM-AG-NC67A-RE-1989-03-VMS-CONOLD.iso' ??? Starting positions: infile = 0 B,? outfile = 0 B ??? Copy block size: 128 sectors?????? Initial skip size: 128 sectors Sector size: 512 Bytes Press Ctrl-C to interrupt ???? ipos:? 205198 kB, non-trimmed:??????? 0 B,? current rate:?????? 0 B/s ???? opos:? 205198 kB, non-scraped:??????? 0 B,? average rate: 637 kB/s non-tried:??????? 0 B,? bad-sector:???? 2048 B,??? error rate: 170 B/s ? rescued:? 205197 kB,?? bad areas:??????? 1,??????? run time:????? 5m 22s pct rescued:?? 99.99%, read errors:?????? 25,? remaining time:???????? n/a ????????????????????????????? time since last successful read:????? 2m? 1s Finished ] So I went ahead and tried the CONDIST from MAY-1989. That too now can be read, although it is proving a somewhat tougher nut to crack: [ $ ddrescue -r5 -v /dev/sr1 CDROM-AG-MN36D-RE-1989-05-VMS-CONDIST.iso CDROM-AG-MN36D-RE-1989-05-VMS-CONDIST.map GNU ddrescue 1.23 About to copy 623247 kBytes from '/dev/sr1' to 'CDROM-AG-MN36D-RE-1989-05-VMS-CONDIST.iso' ??? Starting positions: infile = 0 B,? outfile = 0 B ??? Copy block size: 128 sectors?????? Initial skip size: 128 sectors Sector size: 512 Bytes Press Ctrl-C to interrupt ???? ipos:??? 5919 kB, non-trimmed:??????? 0 B,? current rate:?????? 0 B/s ???? opos:??? 5919 kB, non-scraped:?? 11127 kB,? average rate: 14694 B/s non-tried:??????? 0 B,? bad-sector:??? 2843 kB,??? error rate:????? 85 B/s ? rescued:? 609276 kB,?? bad areas:????? 445,??????? run time: 11h 31m? 2s pct rescued:?? 97.75%, read errors:???? 5884,? remaining time:? 5d 23h 43m ????????????????????????????? time since last successful read:????? 2m 45s Scraping failed blocks... (forwards)??? ] On the plus side, that's 97.75% more data than I had before :-) but the "remaining time" looks like it could be the rest of the week (it varies quite a bit). I think, from reading the manual, that I can use CTRL-C and restart this again later and it will pick up where it left off using the map file. Is this right? Are there any other options I should consider trying? Another thought is that perhaps a shade more polishing might help. If I polish the CDROM a little more and then resume the ddrescue, I think I won't be any worse off than I am now, i.e. all existing data will still be there and all I'll be risking is data that maybe would have eventually read before but now may not read at all. Is that right? Successful reads are now ~20m apart, so I suspect that the remaining data will be quite difficult to recover. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini antonio at acarlini.com