Hi all,
Some here may know I’ve been working on an 11/45 restoration off and on for
some time now. My ’45 currently has floating point, KT11-C mem mgmt, 124 kword
MS11-L, and an RK11-C with one restored RK05 drive.
Last week I decided to see if I could bring up RSTS/E on the machine. I managed
to sysgen a minimal V06C system that can run off a single RK05 pack under simh,
but when I transfer that image to the real hardware using pdp11gui it does not
seem to completely/successfully boot.
The “Option:” boot loader comes up and sub-commands there seem to be working
(in particular, the “HARDWARE” sub command shows correctly detected hardware
and options). When booting RSTS/E, after supplying date and time, the idle
pattern starts on the front panel (but just the bottom part, on the data
lights). When console is in display register mode, it shows an increasing
count. Console input is echo’d, but the INIT banner and subsequent prompts are
never printed and the read light on the RK05 flickers continuously as if the
system is trying to read the same sector over and over.
Figured I’d ping here in case this is a known failure mode to folks more
familiar with RSTS/E? Also posted over on the vcfed DEC forum. FWIW, the
machine is passing all MAINDEC CPU, MMU, FP, KW11, and RK11 diagnostics.
Cheers,
—-FritzM.
