RT11 Freeware Collection

Douglas Taylor dj.taylor4 at comcast.net
Sat Apr 30 11:33:24 CDT 2022


Ken;

This worked perfectly!

I was able to mount the partitions (as shown below) and actually extract 
the entire 65K partition to a *.dsk file that SIMH was able to mount and 
read.
This is what I was trying to do.  Get files from the RT11freewarev2 cd 
into SIMH.  From there I can get them to my real PDP11 hardware.
Some of the files are binary so this process is necessary.

One comment - when you execute a mount command it takes a minute or 2 to 
decompress the file, so be patient!
One question - How did you know how much to skip?

Thanks for the effort you put into creating FSX.

Doug

On 4/29/2022 4:11 PM, Kenneth Gober wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 10:55 AM Douglas Taylor via cctech 
> <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
>     I wanted to extract some parts of the RT11 Freeware iso file that is
>     available on the internet.  The note Tom Shoppa wrote indicates
>     that the
>     CD has 2 partitions.  When I burned the CD on a windows machine I
>     only
>     see one partition.
>
>     How to I extract the 2nd partition off the iso?
>
>
> The second "partition" is just a second copy of all the files on the 
> first partition,
> except in RT-11 volume format so that it can be mounted directly on an 
> RT-11
> system with a CD-ROM drive attached. Since RT-11 volumes are limited to
> 32MB, larger disks are broken up into 32MB 'logical disks'.  The files 
> are on
> logical disks 13 through 19 (i.e. 32MB chunk numbers 13 through 19).
>
> Since it's all the same files, there's little reason to bother looking 
> at the second
> partition if you are able to mount the first.  However, if you want to 
> do it anyway
> I have a Windows command-line tool that can be used to access the 
> RT-11 portions of the iso:
> GitHub - kgober/FSX: File System Exchange, a utility to access data 
> stored in disk images <https://github.com/kgober/FSX>
>
> Here are the FSX commands you would use to mount each of the chunks:
> FSX> mount r13: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz <skip=416m>
> FSX> mount r14: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz <skip=448m>
> FSX> mount r15: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz <skip=480m>
> FSX> mount r16: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz <skip=512m>
> FSX> mount r17: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz <skip=544m>
> FSX> mount r18: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz <skip=576m>
> FSX> mount r19: rt11freewarev2.iso.gz <skip=608m>
>
> FSX knows about .gz files and will treat the 'skip' option as the 
> offset to
> use *after* uncompressing the file.
>
> You can then browse and extract files from each volume:
> FSX> dir r19:
>  29-Apr-2022
>  System ID: DECVMSEXCHNG V41
>  Volume ID: VMS Exchange
>  Owner    : SHOPPA
> README.TXT    23P 15-Oct-1999 TORS84.DSK 24535P 15-Oct-1999
> UCLPLS.DSK   907P 15-Oct-1999 VMSBCK.DSK  1663P 15-Oct-1999
> XASSMB.DSK  2036P 15-Oct-1999 DUSTAT.DSK   100P 15-Oct-1999
> RT11  .LIS    13P 15-Oct-1999 < UNUSED > 36190
>  7 Files, 29277 Blocks
>  36190 Free blocks
>
> FSX>type r19:readme.txt
> Welcome, RT-11 User, to V2.0 of the RT-11 Freeware CD!
> [... remainder removed ...]
>
> FSX>save r19:readme.txt c:readme.txt
> R19:README.TXT => c:readme.txt
>
> -ken



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