DEC Pro 3xx archives

[Paul Koning]

I recently ran into an archive of various Pro 300 items, mostly from DECUS I believe.  That includes a full P/OS 3.2 distribution including (!) DECnet/Pro if I saw that right.

It's at ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/professional/

What makes things somewhat painful is that it's LHA compressed Teledisk images, which is an ancient DOS based floppy imaging tool.  The instructions say to run Teledisk on a DOS system with a 5.25 inch floppy drive to write the images to RX50 floppies, which can then be used.

If you don't have DOS handy, or would rather get floppy image files for use with Xhomer, this can work but it's a bit painful.

I found there's a simpler way.

1. Decompress the LHA files.  On a Mac, the unarchiver (I think that comes with the OS?) handles that format. On other operating systems, I assume it's equally straightforward to find a tool that handles this.  You now have a pile of *.TD0 files, which are the TeleDisk format files.

2. From http://www.seasip.info/Unix/LibDsk/ install LibDsk 1.5 (not 1.4).

3. Use the dsktrans tool you got from step 2 to convert each *.TD0 file to a raw image, like this:
    dsktrans  -otype raw PRO177/177-21.TD0 proinstallv32.dsk
   "raw" format means a straight sector dump in physical order; this is the format expected by xHomer.

If for any reason you want a logical order image, for example to give to the SIMH "rq" device that emulates an RQDXn controller, you'll need a tool that reorders things.  I have one in my RSTS file system tool "flx" (V3 in Python, not the earlier 2.6 in C), "rx50.py".  I can supply more details if needed.  

	paul