On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 09:46, Ron Hudson wrote: Yep. I'll probably put them up on my web site and post a link here. -- TTFN - Guy

Well, it took almost the entire weekend to get the floppy images over to my laptop. I had to get 2 9 track tape drives working (at the same time). What I have is 6 512512 byte (1001 sectors) images of the floppies. This doesn't seem quite right to me and simh didn't want to boot from it. Also if I boot RT from a simulated disk, RT doesn't like the directory (on the floppy). I unfortunately don't have a bootable RT pack for my 11/45 so I can't try it out on real hardware (and have *never* been able to boot from floppy on my 11's). The transfer involved the following: floppy --> files on 11/45 --> tape --> files on laptop I used the following to get the floppy images: dd if=/dev/rrx2 of=/tmp/rt11.n n was the # of the diskette I then tar'd up the directory and put it out on the TU80. I then put the tape in TSZ07 on one of my office machines and then copied the files over to my laptop. The only step I'm not sure about is the original "dd", but it seemed the most reasonable to me. I didn't notice a difference if I used the block device rather than the raw one (ie /dev/rx2 vs rrx2). I don't know if simh is expecting anything different in terms of image for the floppy. I'll continue working on it for a bit (but at a slower pace). I needed to do most of this anyway. I now have a tape of BSD 2 which I can put onto my unix v7m so that's progress (I've even verified that I can read the BSD tape!). Soon I'll be able to use vi on my 11 (no more ed)! On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 09:21, Guy Sotomayor wrote: -- TTFN - Guy

On Sun, 2004-02-01 at 22:52, Doc Shipley wrote: Yea, I had figured that out after I posted. I used: dd if=/dev/rrx2 of=/tmp/rt11.n bs=256 Wouldn't ya know after I created a new tape on the 11, I go to read it on my PC and my SCSI 9-track tape drive has died. It won't power up. :-( I smelled something funny in my office when I got home today but couldn't quite figure it out (the drive was "on" but in standby). I guess I know what that smell was. Go figure. A tape drive that is > 20 years old works great. A newer one (what are the dates on a TSZ07?) dies. I guess the old adage "They don't make 'em like they used to" still holds. That's how I got the original RL02 image onto the 11/45. I like tapes because then I don't have to move equipment around (and it's quite a bit faster than 9600bps over a serial line). -- TTFN - Guy

On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 22:13, Doc Shipley wrote: Yea, it really sucks! Yea, the TU80 is pretty nice (mainly cause it works)! I have a TS11, a couple of Kennedy (9600?) drives in storage. They'll be *way* cooler because they have the tape vertical (so it looks like a proper tape drive). I also have a TE16 that's slated for my 11/70 but since it's a massbus tape drive, I can't do anything with it until I have the 70 running. It will be *way* cool because it's a vacuum column drive. My machine room (garage) when I have the 11/45 powered up (3 H960 racks each with fans in the top + all of the other fans in the 11/45, BA11, etc) is quite noisy. The 11/70 will be deafening (5 H960's) once it's working. Just loading a single RL02 image was about 6 hours! -- TTFN - Guy

On Feb 3, 2004, at 5:57 PM, Tony Duell wrote: That's my take on it, from the sound. <cheat sheet snipped> Thanks, Tony! It's going to be the weekend before I can do it, but I'm printing your post as I type this. More than any other brand, it seems that DEC stuff is dead simple to service if you know how, and impossible if you're playing by ear. Doc

Jerome Fine replies: I realize that a SCSI host adapter for both a Qbus and a Unibus system is still expensive. However, over the past decade, I have found it to be the best investment I ever made. In my case, I found that a removable media drive was also part of the solution. Over 10 years ago, I sold a dual Sony SMO S-501 system to a customer who want to make backups of about 1500 RX02 floppies. The solution being used at the time was to copy 20 RX02 floppies to RL02 packs. There were already almost 50 * RL02 packs in use and an additional 30 * RL02 packs were anticipated. The cost of those extra 30 packs was larger than the dual Sony SMO S-501 drives. The reason for a dual set-up was that each RL02 pack had 2 tape backups as well, one of which was always offsite. With the Sony drives, 3 media (295 MBytes on each side) were sufficient to hold all 80 * RL02 images. Another 6 media held 2 backup copies. All 9 SMO media were about the size of half a loaf of bread as compared with over 5 times the volume for a single RL02. Having dual Sony SMO S-501 drives allowed a copy of each media to be done in about an hour during lunch. In one day, all 5 sides with files could be copied and verified as opposed to over a week if over 80 RL02 packs were copied to tapes. A long time later, I also acquired an Adaptec AHA-2940AU on a Pentium III system along with a few Sony SMO S-501 drives and a lot (over 100) of SMO media. Now I use the SMO media as a backup on both systems along with the ability to transfer files between any real DEC PDP-11 system and a PC. On the PC, I run Ersatz-11 and RT-11 under Windows 98 SE. I caution that I am fortunate to have the "Full" (Commercial) version of Ersatz-11, however, PUTR is able to handle copies of RT-11 partitions. The key point is that the SMO media still seem ideal even at just 295 MBytes a side for file transfer between a PC and a real DEC PDP-11. A bit of an admission - I now use a DVD for backup on the PC and have 15 * SMO S-501 images on each DVD. How times have changed. And the 15 * SMO S-501 images are usually kept as files on a 40 GByte hard drive. About 15 years ago, I was asked to transfer the files from a 240 MByte hard drive on a DEC PDP-11/73 system which included a 9 track tape drive. The target system was a 486 running Unix which did not have a tape drive. This was a one time transfer, so the time was not critical. I took a while at 9600 baud using Kermit, but eventually it was done. Fortunately not all the files needed to be transferred. While tapes are great in some cases, I find that I prefer the Sony drives. Lacking that, the serial transfer was a simple solution. Coming in the next day to find the transfer almost complete overnight was a big advantage. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.