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Dumping Images of my VAX-11/730's Drives?

Hi All;

NF6X, Thank You for the Link, it is an interesting Reading..
Given time and suggestions from others, I think You will get it..
Keep up the good work..

THANK YOU Marty
 
jackrubin said:
Knowing nothing about the resources available, what would it take to load UNIX/Eunice on the VAX and have the tools you need for imaging on both ends?
Click to expand...

I haven't a clue about what it takes to run Unix on this VAX. But just brainstorming, I wonder if there is some Unix version that would fit in 10 megabytes and has drivers for the hard drive controller and ethernet card, plus some form of networking? If so, maybe I could create an RL02 image of it, copy it to an RL02 pack over DECnet, then boot it up and use it to extract data from the R80 drive?
 
NF6X said:
I haven't a clue about what it takes to run Unix on this VAX. But just brainstorming, I wonder if there is some Unix version that would fit in 10 megabytes and has drivers for the hard drive controller and ethernet card, plus some form of networking? If so, maybe I could create an RL02 image of it, copy it to an RL02 pack over DECnet, then boot it up and use it to extract data from the R80 drive?
Click to expand...

You may be able to setup a system that mounts /usr over NFS, so you'd be able to just have boot/root on the RL02 pack and use the network to support the rest of the system. You'd probably be able to emulate it in SIMH for testing, then copy the SIMH image to a real pack.

I found these instructions on installing UWisc 4.3 BSD with NFS support: http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_4.3_BSD_NFS_Wisconsin_Unix
 
That might just work. However I image that R80 drive, once I do so I might install BSD on it. I can always boot into VMS from an RL02 pack when I want to.

Hmm, another idea comes to mind. Rather than pushing the data from the VMS end where the COPY program appears to exit on a read error, maybe I can pull the data from the Linux end. If I can open the drive as a file over DECnet and the protocol allows me to seek past any bad blocks, then it may be easier for me to code up something to pull over all readable blocks from the Linux end.
 
I would boot the 11/750 off the RL02 (VMS 5.x?), connect via DECnet and then do a BACKUP/IMAGE and BACKUP/PHYSICAL from the R80 with the output target on the Linux machine. Backup will complain about any bad blocks, but it should keep going and grab as much intact data as possible.

You can then take the image, make spare copies and then mount it under a copy of VMS in SIMH (or similar) and extract, analyze/repair the volume.

Good luck!
 
I tried to do that, but specifying a file on the Linux VM as the destination rather than a tape drive didn't seem to work. The help for BACKUP mentioned restrictions on specifying DECnet nodes, but I don't fully understand them yet. I'll need to experiment some more.
 
I will be working to set up DECNET this week and next, to make a connection between two vax machines on my local network. (4000-200 and microvax3100). I am chiming in to see if we can collaborate, maybe even connect vax servers remotely via DECNET.

I bought more connectors today on Ebay.

B
 
Can you share the command and error message used to try to backup over DECNET?
e.g $ BACKUP/IMAGE DRA100: Charon::DRA100_IMAGE.bck/save

If the Linux VM cannot present a file system compatible with BACKUP, then look into running a copy of VMS in SIMH. Basic clustering is easy to establish and then you can either push or pull a backup to the virtual server. Networking can be a speed bump, but you obviously have cleared that hurdle before.

Storing BACKUP saveset files can be a challenge outside of Files-11. Most of the time if you can move the binary of the file sucessfully, there are ways to restore the file attributes - see http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/473
 
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