25 Nov
2003
25 Nov
'03
12:53 a.m.
On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Mr Ian Primus wrote:
Yup. The ROM (or your boot routine) read the first
(sometimes
second) block of that, which in turn goes to read the rest.
Well, the three tapes I tried must not have been
bootable (or at least not directly bootable) I do have
one more tape, that does seem to be a BRU tape. I
booted it, and it did more. It loaded for longer, then
crashed. Woohoo! It's working well enough to crash! (I
think this is an improvement). When it crashed, it
gave me this:
SYSTEM CRASH AT LOCATION 011336
REGISTERS
R0=000304 R1=172522 R2=063107 R3=172520
R4=000010 R5=000000 SP=117756 PS=000010
SYSTEM STACK DUMP
LOCATION CONTENTS
117756 000004
004412
@
OK. R3 is pointint at 172520, which is the MSCP DISK
controller address (KDA50,UDA50,RQDX, etc.) It probably
decided to bail out after finding no usable disk controllers.
I don't know off the top of my what model tape
controller I'm using. I'll have to check when I get
back home tonight. I know it's an Emulex, but that
really doesn't help. <grin>
It doesnt :) When doing remote debugging, I
usually wanna
know what I am dealing with, for both disk and tape controllers.
File 0 :
blocksize 512 (439 blocks)
OK, so I guess that File 0 is what I'm currently
reading, correct? Is this the part of the tape that
has that error message in it? Well, it looks like I'll be trying to write a tape
tonight. I'll have to connect the Prime's SCSI tape
drive to a PC, I should just be able to dd a tape
image to the tape device without any problems, right?
Yup. Well, hmm. PDP-11 boot
tape usually have a number
of "files" on them, and each "file" can use more than one
block size- see my example. You can't just dd it to a
file, and then from a file back to tape.
Or will I have to write it in segments, specifying the
block size as I go? I haven't done a lot with tape
Yep.
formats before. Also, once I figure out which tape
controller I am using, how do I write a compatible
tape from *nix?
No worries, the tape stuf seems to be fine now, we probably
have to concentrate on the disk part now.
--f
--
Fred N. van Kempen, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Collector/Archivist
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Email: waltje(a)pdp11.nl BUSSUM, THE NETHERLANDS / Sunnyvale, CA, USA