RSX-11M newbie. A little help copying files please.

[acollins22]

Hello Folks,

Thanks again to help from these forums and some great website tips, I have been able to SYSGEN RSX-11/M 4.6 under SIMH, copy it onto a CD-ROM and I can now boot that up from my SCSI CD-ROM drive (DU1

I have also INITed my SCSI drive (DU0.

What I would like to do now is copy everything from the CD-ROM to the SCSI drive preserving all directory structures, users etc. so that I get a bootable disk, DU0:

I know this seems a real newbie question but please could someone tell me how to do this bit so I can start to cut my teeth of RSX on real hardware?


Thanks,

Andy.

 

[tradde]

Hello Folks,

Thanks again to help from these forums and some great website tips, I have been able to SYSGEN RSX-11/M 4.6 under SIMH, copy it onto a CD-ROM and I can now boot that up from my SCSI CD-ROM drive (DU1

I have also INITed my SCSI drive (DU0.

What I would like to do now is copy everything from the CD-ROM to the SCSI drive preserving all directory structures, users etc. so that I get a bootable disk, DU0:

I know this seems a real newbie question but please could someone tell me how to do this bit so I can start to cut my teeth of RSX on real hardware?


Thanks,

Andy.

Congrats on booting from CD. I know very little about RSX so can't help there. Good luck and enjoy.

 

[Matlock]

Hello Folks,

Thanks again to help from these forums and some great website tips, I have been able to SYSGEN RSX-11/M 4.6 under SIMH, copy it onto a CD-ROM and I can now boot that up from my SCSI CD-ROM drive (DU1

I have also INITed my SCSI drive (DU0.

What I would like to do now is copy everything from the CD-ROM to the SCSI drive preserving all directory structures, users etc. so that I get a bootable disk, DU0:

I know this seems a real newbie question but please could someone tell me how to do this bit so I can start to cut my teeth of RSX on real hardware?


Thanks,

Andy.

Andy,
Congrats on getting the bootable RSX11M+ V4.6 CR-ROM made. That is quite an accomplishment. Since you have been able to INIT your DU0: drive that means that you have good compatibility with the hardware. Running RSX from a CD-ROM is not so normal as I am not sure whether it is actually writeable? If that is the case you may be able to run BRU from the baseline RSX running on the CD-ROM.

In that case, then I thinl it will be pretty easy. The one thing that you may or may not want to do is re-INIT the DU0: with the number of file headers you want for DU0: You can run out of file headers before you run out of disk space. For a RD54 (~150MB drive I would try 8000. preallocated headers expandable to 15000.

>MOU DU0:/FOR
>BRU /INI/MAX:15000./HEA:8000.
From: DU1:
To: DU0:
BRU -- *WARNING* -- No bad block data file found
BRU - Completed

>
At this point the boot block should be written on DU0: If for some reason RSX won't write everything from DU1: because it is running on it, then you will have to BOOT [6,54]BRUSYS.SYS to use a memory resident form of BRU. I don't remember the details but
>HELP BRU STANDALONE
will give you the needed instructions. The main thing with standalone BRU is to make sure it knows the CSR and VECTOR for your DU1: and DU0: drives that under standalone BRU can both be mounted foreign and copied.

Good Luck!
Mark

 

[acollins22]

Thanks Mark,

I ran the standalone BRU as suggested and recreated the file system with bigger limits.

I've tried mounting the drive but it asks me for the label and I didn't specify any so I don't know what to say.

Please could someone explain how to mount my newly formatted drive, DU0: and copy the system from the CD-ROM (DU1 to it. I know it seems a bit simple but I've been pouring through the BRU section of the utils manual and I just can see how to do it.

I thought I could do it from CL using PIP but I can't get my head around the directory structure.


Thanks,

Andy.

 

[acollins22]

Success

I misunderstood the BRU process and that was holding things up. I didn't realise how long it would take to init the drive (about 15 mins) and so after a couple of mins I pressed ENTER and got a prompt. I though that the BRU INIT had finished but it hadn't.

I went through the process again from the standalone BRU just as Mark suggested but with an /OUTVOLUME: to set a volume label and just waited. After about 15 mins I got...
BRU - Completed

BRU>

I then popped out the CD and restarted and the machine booted all the way. Even better than CD as I don't get the messages saying that it can't write to the disk.

My 11/53 is now ready for the next adventure... Possible even running Adventure though I rather fancy MTREK.

Thanks again for all of the help.


Cheers,

Andy. (Happy)

 

[Matlock]

Andy,
Just to make sure I understand you were able to use standalone BRU and made a copy of the CD-ROM RSX onto the DU0:?

If so and now you just want to mount your new DU0: when you don't know the volume name you use the /OVR switch.
/PUB means it is available to any RSX user and /VI displays the Volume info on mounting.

>MOU DU0:/OVR/PUB/VI
Volume Information
Class: Files-11
Device: DU00
Volume label:RSX11MPBL87
Pack serial: 00000001236
Owner: [1,1]
Protection: [RWCD,RWCD,RWCD,RWCD]
Default: [RWED,RWED,RWED,R]
Processor: F11ACP

>PIP DU0:/FR
DU0: has 168740. blocks free, 142460. blocks used out of 311200.
Largest contiguous space = 147509. blocks
12097. file headers are free, 2903. headers used out of 15000.

To use BRU in non-standalone, one thing I realized I left out was that you need to allocate the drive, but you would
have needed to do that to INIT the drive as well.

Also, if you want to Boot the new RSX disk after starting on the CD-ROM just:

>BOOT DU0:[1,54]RSX11M

One other thing about RSX that's different than RT11 is that you should use a shut down procedure before halting the processor.

> RUN $SHUTUP

For more info on RSX take a look at the pages starting at the links below. The first one describes a project I did last year and the second
link has an excellent description of getting various layered products installed:

http://blinkenbone.com/how-tos/gett...a-quest-for-the-unique-blinking-lights-of-rsx

http://pdp2011.sytse.net/wordpress/pdp-11/sessions/rsx-11m-plus/


By the way what is you PDP-11 configuration? In addition to the BeagleBone Simh RSX system, described in the first link above
I am running a PDP-11/83 with a Emulex UC07 and two SCSI2SD drives and a DELQA. It is running Johnny Bilquist's TCP/IP for
RSX which makes it pretty easy to transfer software to from Linux.

Good luck,
Mark

 

[acollins22]

Hi Mark,

Andy,
Just to make sure I understand you were able to use standalone BRU and made a copy of the CD-ROM RSX onto the DU0:?

Yes.

I booted the machine from the CD-ROM that I built using SIMH as mentioned above. I then ran the standalone BRU as described by you... BOOT [6,54]BRUSYS.SYS
I gave it the options suggested with the addition of /OUTVOLUME:LABEL and waited... and waited... When it had finished, BRU - Completed, I removed the CD-ROM and restarted the machine.

It then booted RSX from its SCSI hard drive for the first time . I don't need the CD any more ;-)

By the way what is you PDP-11 configuration? In addition to the BeagleBone Simh RSX system, described in the first link above
I am running a PDP-11/83 with a Emulex UC07 and two SCSI2SD drives and a DELQA. It is running Johnny Bilquist's TCP/IP for
RSX which makes it pretty easy to transfer software to from Linux.

Good luck,
Mark

My PDP is an 11/53. You can read a bit about it here.. http://www.randomorbit.co.uk though my site is a bit out of date.
Basically it has 1.5mb RAM a CDQ-220A SCSI controller with a 150mb HD and a CD-ROM and that's about it at the moment. I have an Ethernet card for it as well as several 4-port serial cards, a TK-50 controller and a RQDX3 card. I removed most of the cards just to keep things simple though I did mention the ones that I'm putting back in to the SYSGEN so it would build the system to use them.


Thanks again,

Andy.

 

[Matlock]

Andy,
Congrats on booting from the 150 Mb Hard Disk. You are on your way now. The RSX11M+ v4.6 distribution that is available online also has F77 V5.4 Fortran on it as well as DECnet which you'll need for your ethernet card. Anything task that doesn't respond to a command line prompt, for instance:

>F77 TEST.OBJ=TEST.FTN

usually means that the task F77 is not "installed".

>INS $F77

will install LB:[1,54]F77.TSK or LB:[3,54]F77.TSK (which ever it can find) and multi-user tasks have names like ...F77 which when run is combined with your TTn serial port name to be for example F77T1 Linking F77 tasks is done with TKB or FTB and you'll have to specify the Fortran runtime system library for the linking.

>FTB TEST.TSK=TEST.OBJ,LB:[1,1]F77FCS.OLB/LB

My favorite utility in RSX11M is RMD which has multiple screens that will display the active RSX system in many interesting ways. It shows hows tasks and drivers are located in memory, free disk space, pool space, the active task. The S screen shows many system statistics, the I screen shows disk I/O and the C and D screens shows info on the disk memory caching system. The disk caching is something you may want to use to speed up disk operations since you have plenty of memory. (see the SET /CACHE command help).

Getting DECnet running (you do a netgen with [137,10]NETGEN.CMD ) is useful with a Linux system running Simh with DECnet to move files back and forth as well as remote logins. Linux can also run DECnet itself but the way it handles MAC addresses is a bit tricky.

I took a look at your website and your PDP-11/53 is a nice compact system. You should be able to have a good bit of fun with it.

Mark