Reading RX01/02 disks on a PC

[Guy Sotomayor]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 09:35 -0800, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> So I'm in the process of pulling a bunch of files off of some RX02 disks
> to get them onto a PC.
> 
> So far (thanks to help from Howard Harte) I've got an 11/44 with an RX02
> drive running RSTS that has the DD module loaded.  I'm running the serial
> tape drive simulator on a PC (I forget what it's called or who wrote it).
> So I can do:
> 
> COPY DY1:*.* DD0:
> 
> Which then copies all the files off of the disk into an image file on my
> PC.  Works very nicely, albeit slowly (only 9600bps transfer rate).
> 
> Is there a better way to do this?  I've seen various postings of people
> getting RX02 drives connected to Linux boxen.  How so?  Has anyone done
> this?

On my 11/45 running v7 unix, I "dd" the floppies I want into the
appropriate files on one of the disks and then use "tar" to write them
onto a 9-track tape.  I then sneakernet the 9-track tape over to a PC
that has a SCSI 9-track tape drive and read them off.  It turns out to
be *much* faster than serial.

It works *very* well and I use it in both directions...if there's an
image that I want to get from the net onto "real" media, I put it on a
tape and then carry the tape over to the 11/45 and write it onto the
appropriate media.

> 
> I also found this:
> 
> http://www.chd.dyndns.org/rx02/
> 
> This is very cool.  It's an RX02 simluator (hardware/software) that makes
> your PDP11 think your PC is an RX02 drive.  It would be great if I could
> read the files from a real RX02 and then dump them into the emulated RX02.
> 
> Can a PDP11 have two sets of RX02 drives installed at once?  If so, do the
> second set of drives become DY2: and DY3:?
> 
-- 

TTFN - Guy