--- "Fred N. van Kempen" <waltje_at_pdp11.nl> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Ian Primus wrote:
>
> > OK, that's good, I was worried that the tape drive
> might be damaged, or
> > have dirty heads or something.
> Well, as was suggested earlier, this COULD come from
> the hardware,
> but I doubt it. Your hardware (the 11/73) doesnt
> know this beast,
> and you use a manually typed-in boot loader, which
> only can do one
> thing, and that is loading the secondary boot. And
> that magically
> seems to load something, then halts.
>
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
_at_
So, it definitely seems to be loading _something_. I
don't know what though. I tried booting this tape
without the hard drive connected, but I don't think it
should matter. I hooked up the hard drive, and tried
to boot off it by toggleing the boot switch or typing
g, but it doesn't seem to work. I must not have a boot
ROM in there that it can read. I haven't tried booting
this tape with the hard drive connected, but I don't
think it should make any difference.
> Continuing yoields you the bad-volume message, which
> imho has to be
> on the tape. I just checked the image of my
> RSX11-M-PLUS V4.2
> tape, and sure enough, that message is in there, so
> we *did* load
> it off the tape. Our tape unit works :)
>
> As said earlier, *we* load the secondary in memory,
> which seems to
> work. Next, we pass control to that code, and that
> code will then
> try to load more stuff off the tape. Since it
> expects a TM11
> controller at that address, it will program for
> that. And then
> the load fails, since the TS11 doesnt respond to the
> commands
> sent to it.... "not bootable" we get shown...
>
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>
> That depends, but yeah, always the same density.
> Most of the system
> load files are in 512-byte blocks. Here is a list
> of my V4.2 tape:
>
> 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?
Or will I have to write it in segments, specifying the
block size as I go? I haven't done a lot with tape
formats before. Also, once I figure out which tape
controller I am using, how do I write a compatible
tape from *nix?
Ian Primus
ian_primus_at_yahoo.com
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Received on Tue Nov 25 2003 - 08:42:49 GMT