29 Aug
2006
29 Aug
'06
1:43 p.m.
On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 14:11 -0600, J Blaser wrote:
For the DEC uVAX gurus out there...
Strangely, it almost appears that there is no low
level format on the
drives, doesn't it? I'm not smart enough to make that call though, and
it seems strange that *all three* drives show this same result. Is it
possible that the original owner somehow 'bulk erased' the drives? I
did, at least, expect to find formating marks.
Is there something I've missed, trying to image these 'DEC' drives? Did
I miss some not-so-obvious jumper somewhere (though I diligently
examined all documentation I could find)? Surely, they're just good-ol'
MFM drives, right?
I'm not a guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I know that the
RQDX3 controllers wrote a low level format different than RQDX1/2, so
its not unlikely that the PC MFM controllers won't be able to read it.
That said, you might be able to retrieve the data from there by booting
NetBSD on the uVAX and dd'ing out the network (or heavens!) the serial
port. You should be able to boot NetBSD without writing anything to the
drives. If it has a tape, you could spool out to it and then try
reading it on a more PC-happy tape drive.
I kinda miss my uVAX II w/RA82 hanging on it :) Not terribly efficient,
but it sounded cool. Now if I could get a reasonable PDP-11 that my
wife wouldn't object to :)
Brian