On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 10:02 AM, Rod Smallwood via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Hi > > I have a bunch of .dsk RT11 400k image files I need to write to RX50 > disks so I can boot from them on my 11/73 > > Somewhere there is a utility that will write the images to RX50 on a DEC > Rainbow 100 under MS-DOS . Anybody know where to find it? I recently hacked on one written by Jeff Armstrong as part of my efforts to read the Venix disks... If all you want is to copy, his version is fine (mine added retries, etc before I had kyroflux working reliably) It understands both physical layout (so the ability to dump / restore the sectors in format order, which is 1, 2, 3, ... 10) as well as logical layout (where you read the physical sectors in the order 1 3 5 7 9 2 4 6 8 10 to construct an image that upper layers view as being in order). It's call rbimg. You can get it form his web site: http://jeff.rainbow-100.com/wp/?tag=rbimg or you can download a mirrored image at http://people.freebsd.org/~imp/rbimg.zip that I just copied over since Jeff's site is on his Rainbow and a little slow... You just need DOS which can FORMAT the drive, and then this program can copy the disks (of course, if you have the physical media, you can use diskcopy which also copies the whole disk, but has limited retry ability). As for using Linux to read/write RX-50's, that works... To an extent... The disks read are fine, but due to differences in write heads due to the differences in so-called QD and HD media, the disks written tend to have issues. Usually they will read fine on other 5.25" PC drives. Most of the time, the RX-50 can read them as well. But In the 300 Rainbow floppies I recently images, of the 15 that didn't read, 10 were disks that had been written on the high density 5.25" drives drives (and only 4 were readable). Those disks were written prior to 1995 (as were the majority of the other ones, I'll add), so this is clearly a retention issue... Warner
