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How to access a Professional 350/380 (RSX-11) disk from VAX/VMS?

Tag auch,

the filesystem should be also Files-11 if i remember correctly.
Idk what hardware you have, but an BA23 based Microvax with RQDX3 or an Microvax2000 booted as a satellite should be able to read it.
The only thing idk atm is how the Pro systems forrmat the drive ( RQDX3 compatibility... ).
Another option can be to put the drive in an PDP11 system and image it with Joergs pdp11gui and then try to read it in Simh...
Have fun...
 
Pro disks are readable by RQDX3/2 controllers and probably 1's. I think the interleave is the same as well. So should not be much of an issue.
 
I got the understanding that the RQDX3 format differ quite a lot from the format of RQDX1 and RQDX2 which are similar/identical.

What about using David Gessweins MFM-emulator? That should give you a image that can be used in SimH.
 
Really? I think the main difference in formatting on the RQDX3 is on the hard disk side: The 1 and 2 used ROMs to store disk geometries and figured out of the drive was an RD50/51/52 or in later models an RD53 with a 3-1 interleave. RQDX3 read and wrote a reserved block on the disk to get the geometry and did a 1-1 formatting of the disk.

From an RX50 point of view I believe they were the same. Note later versions of the RQDX3 ROMs could handle RX33 floppies as well.
 
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic...hardware/micronotes/numerical/micronote43.txt

The RQDX3 is the enhanced version of the RQDX family of MSCP RX/RD
device controllers. Disks previously formatted on RQDX1/2 controllers
will not be compatible with the RQDX3 controller. The RQDX1/2 stores
the disk geometry information in ROM while the RQDX3 stores the data on
the disk itself and reads in the track that contains this information
during the power up sequence. Further the RQDX3 uses a 17 sector per
track format while the RQDX1/2 uses an 18 sector per track format.
There are also a few performance enhancements to the RQDX3 that add to
its preference as a disk controller over the older versions, those being
a 1:1 disk interleaving versus 3:1 interleaving for the earlier
controllers, an elevator seek reordering algorithm is used as well as an
algorithm to handle overlapped seeks when multiple RD5ns are resident in
a system. Further the problem that existed with the RQDX2 hold-off
timer has been fixed on the RQDX3 by increasing the length of the timer
so as not to steal DMA grants from a second RX/RD controller or other
DMA devices in the system.
Click to expand...
 
I was under the impression that the thread creator was discussing hard drives. That a RX50 formatted disk can be read on any DEC hardware is obvious I think. The other matter is if it understands the filesystem. But VMS should be able to understand Files-11 as far as I understand.
 
Yes, my mistake - it's almost certainly that the thread creator was discussing hard drives. And if we are talking about a hard drive with a Pro/350-380, then everything is rather sad - suspecting that you can't do without David Gessweins MFM-emulator ..
 
Well the Pro380 controller for hard drives is completely different from the RQDXAnything. It formatted the disks, but only did 16 sectors per track because 4 bit register in the controller for sector or something stupid like that. The whole controller is an oddball, it's programmed more like a traditional RK07/RX01 than an MSCP type unit and the biggest officially supported drive is an RD53.

You can use something like Dave's tool to suck one into an image, then run XHomer or somesuch to mount it and look at stuff.
 
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