Installing an operating system on the 11/83 - update.

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 22, 2022, at 12:27 PM, Joshua Rice via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> I have a generic 5.25” (not sure of brand) in my dell GX1 but it writes plain SSDD floppies in RX50 format no problem. 
> 
> The RX33 was a pretty standard PC floppy drive AFAIK, just configured (with jumpers) to work as an RX33. You may find better milage configuring it as a PC floppy drive, as PUTR expects to work on PC drives at the device level. Having a real RX33 might be throwing it off. Don’t take it as gospel, since i’ve not got an RX33 to test it with.
> 
> Not sure if PUTR can copy images to a floppy, as i’ve only used it to build a bootable RT11 disk, and make a few RT11 disks out of the contents of images mounted by PUTR. You might find it better to work on a blank formatted floppy and build up from there.

I have a utility to go between real floppies and images, it's included with my RSTSFLX utility.  It can deal with interleaving, so (for example) you can have an image file in logical block order as they usually are, and copy that to a floppy in the correct physical order.  Or you can have an image that's in physical order, as you would use for the xHomer fork of SIMH.

Look for svn://akdesign.dyndns.org/flx/trunk -- the program I mentioned is rx50.py.  

I have no idea if this can be made to work on Windows, but it runs fine on Linux.  (I did once, long ago, write code for DOS -- DJGPP -- to access the PC floppy in the right way to read/write RX50 format floppies, but while that works fine under Win95 it probably won't work under WinNT derivatives.)

	paul