MicroVax II update

[Douglas Taylor]

On 8/5/2016 4:48 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 was able to expand the compressed file using 7-Zip and generate the 
iso image.  However, when I tried to burn the iso to a CD Win7 reported 
that 'The selected disk image file is not valid'.  Not sure what all 
that means, but anyway VMS can't handle a CD with 2048 block size so I 
stopped fooling around with that.
>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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...
>
> Josh
Yes, I believe that is the way to proceed.  Let the SCSI2SD be a couple 
of drives, one for installing the software onto and another to contain 
the installation CD image.  At this point it is kind of a 'chicken and 
the egg' thing for me, the only scsi interface I have is on the VAX.  I 
don't have one on the PC where the VMS image is, so I'm perplexed as to 
how I get the software installation CD onto the SCSI2SD SD card.
>
>> 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.
>>
>> Doug
>>