I'm copying files off a bunch of RX02 floppies and of course I hit the
inevitable bad block (though not nearly as many as you might think, or
perhaps you're like me and you've learned that good quality floppies are
generally way more reliable than might otherwise be thought).
The COPY command in RT-11 has some very handy options for getting around
bad blocks.
First off, there's the /IGNORE option. This will ignore any bad blocks
and switch to a slower, block by block copy mode. I'm not sure what will
be in place of the bad blocks of the output file (I haven't done any
detailed analysis), but it will copy the file in its entirety to the
output device.
The /SLOWLY option works the same as the /IGNORE option (copies a file
block by block) except that it does not ignore errors.
If you end up having one or more bad files, you can do one of two things:
you can either try to copy all the files with the /IGNORE option specified
(very slow), or you can use the /EXCLUDE option to have the copy process
exclude the bad file(s), or files you've already copied.
Assume you're copying from DY1: to DD0: and the first file on DY1: has bad
blocks. You can skip over it like so:
COPY/EXCLUDE DY1:(FILE.DAT) DD0:
This will copy all files EXCEPT for the file(s) specified in the filespec
inside the parenthesis. You can also use wildcards. You can also include
multiple filespecs by separating them with a comma within the parenthesis.
The /EXCLUDE option can be useful to skip over files you've already copied
if you are continuing a whole disk copy after an error, but it can have
limited usefulness in this regard, depending on the how the files are
named.
This and more goodness available in the RT-11 Users Guide, courtesy of
Gordon Bell:
http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/Digital/RT-11%20System%20Users%20Guide%201977.pdf
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Wed Feb 16 2005 - 21:41:20 GMT