PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

[Fritz Mueller]

> On Jan 4, 2019, at 5:15 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> So the likely answer is that either your INIT.BAC program, or your BASIC.RTS, is damaged ...
> Can you read the RK05 from the machinery you used to fill it originally?  It might make sense simply to read parts of it, or all of it, and verify the contents are correct.

Okay, I’ve managed to pull back an image of the RSTS pack I’ve been trying to boot, with PDP11GUI.  A quick look with od and diff shows many differences between the two, but that’s not totally surprising I guess since the image on the real hardware was reconfigured with ODT, and its swap, error log, and crash files may be different?  I’ll have to dig a little deeper there to sort the wheat from the chaff.

But what *is* surprising is that the pulled back image boots and runs just fine under SIMH! Hmm...

I guess I’ll go ahead and finish up my standalone sector CRC hack and run it both on the real hardware and on the just retrieved image with no changes on either end and make sure those are really identical.

If that’s the case, it will come down to what’s different between my machine and SIMH.  Maybe I’ve got some flaky memory on my machine?  I can push harder on diagnostics on the MS11 and see if I can find anything fishy I guess.  Lurking bug in the RK11 maybe?  All the CPU, FPU, KT11, KW11, and RK11 MAINDECS are passing just fine.  Puzzler...

    --FritzM.