Firing up the pdt11

[Ethan Dicks]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 7:15 PM Chris Zach via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Well, the drive is working. Better...

Excellent!

>  I've heard that the RX02 can format an RX01, but can it?

Nope.

There were 3rd party controllers that could format 8" media in DEC
machines (DSD for one).

DEC controllers and DEC 8" drives cannot.  Not for any platform.

Back in the day, DEC floppy users purchased pre-formatted floppies.
If you had an RX02, you could "INIT" an RX01 floppy to RX02 use -
essentially just rewriting the data portion of the sector to
double-density (256 bytes per sector) and I _think_ it's possible to
put it back.

CP/M users could and did buy blank media and format it.

-ethan