29 Aug
2006
29 Aug
'06
2 p.m.
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.
Gack! Good point, you can't move drives between the RQDX1/2 and RQDX3 can
you? To toss in another monkeywrench 3rd party controllers are likely to
use different format(s) (I'm pretty sure the one I have does).
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.
How hard is it to setup things to netboot NetBSD in a diskless configuation?
This sounds like the logical solution.
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 :)
My MicroVAX III sits in a 3rd party chassis ~4U in a rack on top of DEC
enclosures for RA72 and RA73 drives. It also has RL01 and RL02 drives. I
built it specifically for these sorts of tasks. Unfortunatly it's also
sitting in storage where I can't use it :^( If I'm ever able to get it out
of storage I'll most likely add a SCSI (tape and disk) controller to it.
Zane