Thank you all for the tips and pointers. I like the idea of pulling the
image off of my real drive, but how would I transfer it between the pdp and
my Linux box with Simh? It is too big for the tu58 emulator.
On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 03:15 cz via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
      If you go
this route, be advised, that SIMH creates RD32 disk images
 are not the same size as a real RD32. This will likely cause problems
 when writing a SIMH created image to a real disk (and I'm not talking
 about the additional issues that the trailing metadata on disk images
 from the Pizzolato version of SIMH can cause - the problem I'm
 describing is caused by an incorrect disk size value in SIMH).
 
 True, I think you can get around this by making them  disk in SIMH a
 couple of blocks smaller.
 However there is another way. Format your real RD32 with the RQDX3
 formatter, then once formatted suck it into a file. Then you have an
 exact replica you can mount in SIMH and load it up.
 I did this with a 154mb Hitachi ESDI MCSP disk that went "bad" 30 years
 ago and would not boot. Sucked it in, booted RSX11M off a virtual drive,
 then mounted it. Turns out when I did a purge of old files I deleted the
 RSX11M.TSK file I was using to boot because I forgot to do a /SAV /WB in
 VMR to update the boot block to the new file location. Did that, system
 booted, then copied it back to the "real" Hitachi disk.
 Back in operation. :-)