MicroVax II update

[Jerry Weiss]

On Aug 5, 2016, at 3:48 PM, derschjo at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> On Aug 5, 2016, at 1:42 PM, Douglas Taylor <dj.taylor4 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Progress on getting the MVII up and running:
>> 
>> I ordered the SCSI2SD adapter and it has come in, the plan is to use it as the system disk on the MVII.
>> 
>> The hobbyist VMS PAKS have arrived and I was able to download the VMS 7.3 iso, not sure what I can do with it since I think it must be burned to a 512 byte sector CD.
> 
> Burn it to a CD.  Shouldn't be anything complex here.
> 
>> 
>> I asked if the PAKS were good for older versions of VMS, like 5.5, and was told yes they were.  We'll see about that.

Yes - I have used the same PAK on 5.5 and 7.3.

>> 
>> The Hobbyist VMS CD I had for VMS 7.2 was found and I was able to get the old Toshiba CD drive to work on the MV 4000 using a CQD 223A.  How can I create an image of these CD's on the VAX 4000 that I could use in an emulator?
>> 
>> I wasn't able to get the UC07 to see the CDROM because of a bad SCSI cable, I had hoped to format the SCSI2SD using the UC07
> 
> Keep in mind that the SCSI2SD can pretend to be a CD-ROM, and can emulate up to 4 SCSI devices at one go.  No need to futz with a real drive if you don't want to...
> 
>> 
>> Is it possible to use the SCSI2SD on a microPDP-11 under RT-11? I ask because of the disk size limit under RT-11.’

Yes.  It works well with the later versions of RT11 V5.5-5.7.     There are DU Handlers (MSCP) that allow a large disk  to be partitioned (in the handler) into multiple drives  I’ve used up to 7 in RT and 20+ in TSX+ drives at the same time.   Each drive is still limited to 32Mb per partition, but you can manage up to 255 partitions (~8GB).

Jerry