I have found, by scoping the data lines in and out of the laptop, that the endless loop on the laptop is only an internal display glitch - i.e. even though when I type characters they echo endlessly on the screen until another key is pressed, only the one (correct) character is sent to the PDP-11 at each keypress. Similarly, when ODT sends a single "@", continuous "@@@@@@@..." echoes on the display. Who knows why. It's annoying but apparently does not affect the functioning of VTserver. Then there was some more learning to interpret the cryptic messages for input and output devices. Although I thought the program was supposed to send my OS/8 image automatically from the "virtual tape" (and its name is in the .vtrc file with 0 = copy bootstrap, 1 = image file), I eventually learned that entering "vt(1,0,0)" (or maybe it was "0,0,1") would accept the OS/8 image file for input. Not sure if my output device command is correct though. I'm trying to write to my second RL02 drive (RL1: on the PDP-11/23+ with a "1" key) and the only output device string that would work is rl(0,1,0). The program does not explain the significance of the (n,n,n) fields, although it does prompt for a string in that format. It did display a confirmation each 100Kb, and did write the entire 2.5 Mb file to the RL drive! Although it's anyone's guess as to whether I did this correctly. When I put the pack in the RL02 attached to my 8/A and press Load, the "Ready" light does not come on, which I believe means the heads have not locked on the servo track. Which is strange because even if I wrote to the wrong places on the disk, it still should be able to sync up. AFAIK it is not possible to overwrite the servo tracks by writing blocks to the disk through a controller card? Or maybe the light is burnt out... or the pack I used is bad... Please also explain to me the limitation for the size of each partition under OS/8 again? 2500 Kb is less than 2 Mw at 12 bits per word? thanks -Charles On Thu, 24 May 2007 08:15:14 -0700, you wrote: