If you go this route, be advised, that SIMH creates RD32 disk images are not the same size as a real RD32. This will likely cause problems when writing a SIMH created image to a real disk (and I'm not talking about the additional issues that the trailing metadata on disk images from the Pizzolato version of SIMH can cause - the problem I'm describing is caused by an incorrect disk size value in SIMH).

True, I think you can get around this by making the disk in SIMH a couple of blocks smaller.

However there is another way. Format your real RD32 with the RQDX3 formatter, then once formatted suck it into a file. Then you have an exact replica you can mount in SIMH and load it up.

I did this with a 154mb Hitachi ESDI MCSP disk that went "bad" 30 years ago and would not boot. Sucked it in, booted RSX11M off a virtual drive, then mounted it. Turns out when I did a purge of old files I deleted the RSX11M.TSK file I was using to boot because I forgot to do a /SAV /WB in VMR to update the boot block to the new file location. Did that, system booted, then copied it back to the "real" Hitachi disk.

Back in operation. :-)

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