Formatting disk on rt11

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Sat Jun 5 16:48:25 1999

>Allison J Parent wrote:

> <Technically, I suppose Allison is correct, but I have
> <never heard of anyone writing their own version of ZRQC??
> No, I am correct. there is no formatter for RDxx drives under RT-11.
> XXDP does it really well but that is NOT RT-ll.

Jerome Fine replies:

I agree to agree!! I think we agree completely, but are just using
different words. Since XXDP has both ZRQB?? (for RD51,2,3
drives) and ZRQC?? (for RD54 drives), then I doubt anyone
would bother at this point to write their own utility to run under
RT-11.

> There is a lot of work but writing a utility to format a RD under
> RT-11 is possible, though if you have the tools and info to do that
> you also know XXDP is available.

So we just use the XXDP version since we don't need to FORMAT
a drive all that often any more.

> <Just a note of clarification (again, Allison this is not a flame that you u
> <but just correcting your "spelling" - anyone who knows realizes and anyone
> <who doesn't understand - it doesn't matter). Allison was referring to the
> <SET DUn: UNIT=u, PART=p
> Actually I've never used a RD larger than 31mb on an RT11 system so the
> SET DUn would not have come to mind. Why no big disks? I have MANY
> MANY RD52s and an RD53/54 would be VAX fodder.
>
> Also while RQDX3s are RD54 aware, some of the RQDX1 and 2s are very much
> unaware of the RD54 and will produce errors.

I believe that an M8639 (RQDX1) will handle an RD51.
I think you need an M8639-YA to also handle an RD52.
I believe that an M8639-YB (RQDX2 - similar in some ways
the the RQDX1, but also very different) can handle up to an RD53 which
is about 70 Mbytes. I don't thank that any RQDX1 or RQDX2 will recognize
an RD54.
The RQDX3 (M7555) is needed to handle the RQDX3 - leave it to DEC
to make things difficult and costly.

On the PDP-11 I have available, there are 3 * Hitachi DK515-78 or almost
2 GBytes. These are ESDI drives on a Sigma RQD11-EC quad MSCP
controller which can run 4 drives and has 1 MByte of cache. The system
uses V5.6 with Y2Y patches and can look at all 60 partitions on the
3 drives (of which 2 are used only for backup). Plus the DUX.SYS
device driver boot block code has been modified so that all 60 partitions
can be booted if so desired. The standard distributed book block from
DEC could boot only DU0: to DU7: and it was a pain not to be able to
boot the partitions on the other drives.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Sat Jun 05 1999 - 16:48:25 BST