Need help with PUTR

[smp]

Hello again, all,

As you know from my previous postings, I am the proud new owner of a PDP11-23, and I recently acquired an Emulex UC07 SCSI interface board.

While I am waiting for my SCSI Zip drive to arrive next week. I figured that I would start playing around with PUTR and (try to) create a disk for my PDP11/23 system.

I have a parallel port 100 MB Zip drive attached to my laptop PC. I have a blank 100MB Zip disk in the Zip drive. I have a disk image of RT11 (from the fellow who sold me the PDP11/23). I have the PUTR program on my laptop PC. I have the PUTR v2.01 document.

I have PUTR running in a DOS window on my laptop PC. I have been trying out some of the commands, but I have not yet gotten much of anything to work - only some error messages. The messages seem to indicate that I have to specify a partition on the Zip drive for whatever action I am attempting. This sounds logical, as the 100 MB Zip drive is something like 10X the size of an RL01 or RL02.

I have been looking at the examples in the PUTR v2.01 document, but they all seem to be associated with various floppy disks, so there are no examples showing how to specify a partition.

I believe that I need to format the Zip drive, then mount it, and then I might be able to transfer my file (RT11RLv53.dsk) onto it. Finally, if I was successful with all that, perhaps I could make the Zip disk, or the Zip disk partition bootable?

Anyway, is anyone out there experienced with using the PUTR program to create one or more RL02 partitions on a Zip drive, or any 100MB disk? I would greatly appreciate some suggestions on how to proceed.

Thanks very much, in advance, for your patience and advice.

smp

 

[smp]

OK, here is an update:

I continued to play around with PUTR and here is what I came up with:

1. I inserted the the Zip disk into the Zip drive

2. I started up PUTR.

PUTR runs in a DOS window. In PUTR, here is the command sequence I did:

3. MOUNT RL0: RT11RL~1.DSK /RL02 /RT11     Mounts the disk image of RT11 that I have.

4. FORMAT E:DU0.DSK /RL02 /RT11            Asks a number of questions, and creates a 10 MB disk image container file on the Zip drive.

5. MOUNT DU0: E:DU0.DSK /RL02 /RT11        Mounts the disk image container file on the Zip drive.

6. COPY /BINARY RL0:*.* DU0:               Copies all the files from the disk image on the laptop PC into the container file on the Zip drive.

7. QUIT                                    Quits the PUTR program.

Starting up PUTR again, mounting the DU0.DSK file, and doing DIR DU0: shows that all the files have been copied into the container file on the Zip drive.

Looking at the Zip disk on the laptop PC, I see one file, DU0.DSK, and its size is 10,240 KB.

I think I've done it. There is a BOOT command in PUTR that is supposed to make the file I created bootable. I tried it, but it starts out by asking me for the name of the monitor file, and I don't know what it is. I know it is one of the .SYS files that I have, but I don't know which one. Does anyone know what that file name is? I also don't know how many other questions this command will ask of me. Can anyone help me with this?

Thanks for listening...

smp

 

[Lou - N2MIY]

Revision: It looks like we both posted within seconds of each other. I'll read your approach....


So the key is that the dos zip disk drivers include an ASPI interface that will allow the zip drive to look like a SCSI device to putr. Obviously I am doing this all under dos on a dos machine. No windows is involved. This is old school MS DOS 6.22 .

In my machine with the internal ATA zip drive, in dos, the zip drive comes up as drive d:. The ASPI driver makes it look like SCSI device 1 to putr.

So, with a zip disk in the drive, in putr, I do:

INITIALIZE SCSI1: /RT11 /MSCP

which will create as many full size (65kblock) RT-11 partitions on the zip disk as will fit.

Then you can work with them by mounting them:

MOUNT DU0: SCSI1: /RT11 /PARTITION:0 (or DU:1 and partition 1, or DU2 and partition 2)

But something is screwy. Only partition 0 actually gets initialized properly as RT11. To initialize the other partitions, you will have to do it on the real pdp-11 UNLESS someone here knows how to do it.

Lou

 

[Lou - N2MIY]

Ok, I read what you just posted. The pdp-11 will not read a container file on a FAT formatted zip disk. The disk needs to be native RT-11 format. You'll need to do what I posted above.

To make the partition 0 bootable, copy over an RT-11 system to the DU0:, then use the BOOT command on DU0:

Oh and, if you have a real SCSI controller in your PC, and use a real SCSI hard disk instead of the zip drive, the above instructions will fill that hard drive with RT-11 max size partitions and properly format partiton 0.

Lou

 

[smp]

Ok, I read what you just posted. The pdp-11 will not read a container file on a FAT formatted zip disk. The disk needs to be native RT-11 format. You'll need to do what I posted above.

To make the partition 0 bootable, copy over an RT-11 system to the DU0:, then use the BOOT command on DU0:

Oh and, if you have a real SCSI controller in your PC, and use a real SCSI hard disk instead of the zip drive, the above instructions will fill that hard drive with RT-11 max size partitions and properly format partiton 0.

Lou

Hi Lou,

Thank you very much for your attention.

I have a laptop PC with a parallel port Zip drive attached. Am I in trouble with this? How do I go about getting the ASPI driver?

Will the command INITIALIZE SCSI1: /RT11 /MSCP take care of everything?

Thanks very much for your attention.

smp

 

[Lou - N2MIY]

Hmmm,

That could be tough. The ASPI driver that allows this all to work is ASPIATAP.SYS . Of course the zip drive needs to be ATA for that to work. I did some quick googling and found that the ASPI driver for the parallel port drive is ASPIPPM1.SYS.

Are you running dos on your laptop? How did you install Guest? (Guest was the dos utility for finding the zip drive and mapping a drive letter.)

Lou

 

[smp]

I did some quick googling and found that the ASPI driver for the parallel port drive is ASPIPPM1.SYS.

Are you running dos on your laptop? How did you install Guest? (Guest was the dos utility for finding the zip drive and mapping a drive letter.)

Hi Lou,

I am running Windows XP on my laptop PC. To install the Zip drive, I ended up installing a driver from the Lenovo support site - but it was not Guest.
I cannot retrace my steps at this point and I do not remember what the driver is called.

Thanks a million for finding ASPIPPM1.SYS. Can you give me a hint on what I do to install it, and how I invoke it?

smp

 

[Lou - N2MIY]

I am not going to be of much help if you're running XP. That ASPIPPM1.SYS is a dos .sys file. Forget about trying to get dos drivers to work under XP.

My experience with this old hardware is limited to dos.

For the curious, I did set up my dos laptop (Hinote Ultra 2000) and a parallel port zip drive. The ASPIPPM1.sys or 2.sys even with the scsicfg.sys and other scsi driver that come with the dos driver installation package do not work with PUTR to cause the zip drive to look like a connected scsi device. This appears to be a unique feature of the aspiatap.sys driver for the ATAPI zip drives. It was worth trying though.

Lou

 

[smp]

Hi again, Lou,

So, I tried your command statement verbatim on my laptop PC (INITIALIZE SCSI1: /RT11 /MSCP) and I received an (expected) error message - something like "no ASPI driver."

I have a desktop PC out in my garage with DOS 5 on it that I occasionally use for making diskettes from images with Dave Dunfield's IMD.

I downloaded the Guest software and put it on that PC. I see that there are a number of files in that folder with ASPI in the filename. After attaching my Zip drive, I ran Guest, and after a while it came back, giving me E: as the label for the Zip drive.

I ran PUTR on that machine, and it can see the Zip drive (after it was set up by Guest).

When I tried your command again (INITIALIZE SCSI1: /RT11 /MSCP), I receive the error message "drive not found."

I tried a number of other PUTR commands, and PUTR seems to work fine with my Zip drive if I am pretending for it to be an RL02, so I am confident that I have things working, but the SCSI portion not yet.

Am I in better shape with "drive not found?" Can you offer any advice about getting this to go?

Thanks, in advance, for your patience and response.

smp

 

[AK6DN]

I have transferred files from XP windows systems to my PDP-11 (11/44 with an Emulex UC-17 UNIBUS SCSI card) using a different flow.

On the windows XP PC I have an old Adaptec SCSI card (AHA-2940 series). Installs and works fine with Windows XP. And I have no reason not to believe this whole process would not work under Linux either, altho I have not personally tried that.

(1) I plug my SCSI disk cage (I have three SCSI drives plus a CDROM in a cabinet) into the XP system and boot it up.
(2) On windows I have the 'cygwin' unix environment installed, so I use the 'dd' utility to copy a disk image from XP to SCSI:

dd if=rt11.dsk of=/dev/sdb

where rt11.dsk is my SIMH (in this case) disk image file, and /dev/sdb is the SCSI drive target.
(3) Now remove the drive from XP (powerdown) and transfer to the PDP-11 and boot it up.

I have transferred RT-11, XXDP, and 2.11BSD disk images this way with no issue

I have never used PUTR (mainly because I have no pure DOS system) but I have never found the need, either.

Since I have a SCSI CDROM in my SCSI cabinet I have also used windows utilities to burn a CDROM image disk from SIMH disk images and popped these into the SCSI CDROM on my PDP-11 and booted them up. RT-11 and XXDP both run fine from a SCSI CDROM (which is writelocked of course).

Don

 

[Lou - N2MIY]

The ASPI drivers for the parallel port connected zip drive will not work with PUTR. I tried it (mentioned earlier). At this point, you should look for an ATAPI internal zip drive (like the setup I have here) to put in your garage DOS 5 PC, or perhaps also consider Don's route if you have a SCSI adapter you can put in that PC.

Lou

 

[smp]

The ASPI driver that allows this all to work is ASPIATAP.SYS . Of course the zip drive needs to be ATA for that to work.
I did some quick googling and found that the ASPI driver for the parallel port drive is ASPIPPM1.SYS.

For completeness, I checked out the files that I have in my Guest folder, and along with others, I have both ASPIPPM1.SYS and ASPIPPM2.SYS, and they are being loaded by the Guest.ini file.

Lou, if you say that the ASPI files that come with Guest do not work, I guess I'm getting to the end of the line here.

I was really hoping that I would not have to go off on another computer construction adventure simply to be able to get an OS onto my DEC system.

Sigh...

smp

 

[Lou - N2MIY]

Do not think of it as another computer construction adventure. Think of it as building up your toolkit. Anyway, you don't need to build another computer, you need to add capabilities to your garage PC that is already your imagedisk tool. That tool will now be even more functional!

By the way, this is not the only way to get RT-11 into your machine. Don's or Will's TU58 emulators are another route that works just fine, albeit a little slower.

If worst came to worst, I could snail mail you a bootable zip disk. That would be cheating you know, and you still need a way to get the files you want off of the internet and into that 11/23.

Lou

 

[Gerardcjat]

@ LOU , and others also ;-)

I follow closely, as I will have ( soon, I hope ) to follows the same road as SMP does.

In that aspect, --- easy file transfert from Internet / Simh / ... to the real PDP 11/23 ---

LOU ( and others ;-) ), would you recommand the following set-up :

- internal ATA Zip drive in an OLD DOS PC

** OR ** same in a " not so old" PC, provided we can boot it on pure DOS ( ??? )

- SCSI Zip drive attached to the PDP through ( ?????? " file the blank, please " ???? ) interface card

What seems you the easyest way to start / do it ???

 

[Lou - N2MIY]

Gerard,

I am biased toward older equipment, so I vote for internal ATA zip drive in old dos PC.

On the qbus pdp-11 end, there are any number of controllers that could work, but I have a CMD CQD-220, and we know that SMP has an Emulex UC-07. I suppose the most desirable controller would be a real dec RQZX1, which are rare and cost a fortune. I am sure others here could chime in with what they use.

Although this SCSI route is really convenient, there are plenty of other ways to get an operating system to the qbus pdp-11. I daresay it is the "expensive" route, whereas emulated TU58 is clearly the most economical route. Other ways include RX01 8" floppy (can be written on a PC using PUTR), RX50 or RX33 5.25" floppies (also can be written on the PC with PUTR), or Reinhard's RL02 emulator (if you have an RLV11 or RLV12 and you build his emulator.) I'm sure there are more ways than that, but those are the only ones I've used.

Lou

 

[Gerardcjat]

Quote : "I am biased toward older equipment"

I AM, too .
Thanks for the reply.
I think I will start with TU58 emulation and then head, as soon as I may get a decent priced interface card ( UC-07 ), to Zip 100 medium for files transfer, which seems "fun" to play with.

( Still waiting the "big" capacitors in order to fix the power supply :-(( )

 

[jackrubin]

There is another wrinkle on this that works well for me. I have an ATA ZIP drive in my Win7 computer. I've been able to transfer SIMH images to PDP-bootable ZIP disks by using a variety of "dd" like block-copy programs. Two that have worked for me are WinImage and WinDD. This method is more brute force and only puts a single image on the ZIP drive (i.e. no partitions as allowed by PUTR but it should support a partitioned disk image if you've created it in SIMH before copying it) but it does get you up and running. I've used it to create a bootable XXDP disk and also a bootable RT-11 system disk which I then used to initialize an RL02 pack.

Of course, this minimally requires a system with an IDE controller but there are plenty of candidates available that support a current OS. You can always dual boot into DOS or Linux if necessary.

Jack

 

[smp]

Hello again,

I now have the TU-58 emulator running on a second SLU in my PDP-11/23 system, and I also have a good SCSI hard drive as well as a Zip drive attached to my Emulex SCSI interface board.

Given that I did not have any luck with interfacing my parallel port Zip drive on my garage PC as an SCSI device before, I decided to do some experimenting with what I have. What if I attached my laptop running the TU-58 emulator to my garage PC? Could I then copy RT-11 out to the TU-58 emulator by using PUTR?

It was easy to attach my laptop to my garage PC with a null modem serial cable. Lou's TU-58 emulator is great for showing everything that happens when you have verbose and debug toggled on.

I acquired a file that is supposed to be an RL02 disk image of RT-11 version 5.3. On my garage PC the file name is RT11RL53.dsk.

On the laptop I started the TU-58 emulator:

> tu58em -p 1 -s 9600 -i smp-rt11.dsk

After the emulator started up with the expected sign-on messages, I toggled debug and verbose on.

On the garage PC, I started PUTR, then issued the following commands:

> MOUNT D: RT11RL53.DSK /RL02 /RT11
> MOUNT T: COM1:9600/DRIVE:0 /TU58 /RT11
> SET COPY BINARY
> COPY/DEVICE D: T:

And off it all goes. I can see all the activity on the emulator screen, commands and strings of bytes coming in.

After a little while (far, far shorter than one would expect for a 10 MB transfer at 9600 bps) it all stops.

PUTR indicates: "? WRITE ERROR."

TU58EM indicates:

info: putpacket
02 0A
40 00 00 00 00 00 00 FE 00 00
43 08

...then a number of info lines that indicate that the emulator received two INITs in a row, causing it to reinitialize.

The "putpacket" command seemed odd to me because the emulator seemed to be reporting that it was consistently receiving "getpacket" commands while it was chugging away.

I certainly have been successful in showing that PUTR can copy stuff out to the TU-58 emulator attached to the PC com port.

When I checked in the TU-58 emulator directory, I see that I have a file called smp-rt11.dsk, and the file size is 256 K bytes. I tried booting XXDP on my PDP-11/23 and then doing a DIR DD0: to take a look at that file on the TU-58 emulator, but XXDP doesn't understand RT-11 directory structure, so I got a never ending listing of garbled stuff.

My question is this: Did PUTR stop sending data to the TU-58 emulator because it knows that it sent 256 K bytes worth? This is my guess. Is there any way to send the entire 10 MB RL02 disk image out to the TU-58 emulator using PUTR? I believe that the TU-58 emulator would be able to handle it all because Don has stated this in some of his comments on this forum. What commands should I be using to achieve this with PUTR?

I am assuming that since the RT11RL53.DSK file I have is supposed to be a bootable disk image, if I can get it out to a file on the TU-58 emulator, I could then try to boot this file from the TU-58 emulator by using the XXDP boot command.

Any ideas, comments, suggestions?

smp

 

[AK6DN]

Some comments:

(1) When you use TU58EM to 'initialize' blank media it will create a 256KB file, the size of a real TU-58 cartridge. If you use one of the options to initialize it as RT-11 filesystem or XXDP filesystem it will write the appropriate empty directory structure on the image.

(2) If you want to do a byte level copy of the image file RT11RL53.DSK why not just mount it on TU58EM using the -r option? That is basically what you would end up with by doing the device byte copy is PUTR.

(3) If you want to create a blank TU-58 image file of size greater than a real TU-58 (256KB) you need to use something like 'dd' or such unix tools (ie, "dd if=/dev/zero of=MYFILE.DSK bs=1M count=10" to create a 10MB zero-filled image). This will NOT be an empty RT-11 filesystem, it would be the same as putting a TU-58 tape filled with all zeros in a drive.

(4) The only time TU58EM knows about the size of a image is when you initialize it using TU58EM; it then assumes it is 256KB like a real TU58 media. In all other cases TU58EM knows the size of the image based on the file size you mount on that virtual drive.

PUTR could have stopped the copy because either (1) it know how big a TU-58 is, and threw an error, or (2) TU58EM will throw an error (seek error) if you try and read or write past the end of the emulated image.

Don

 

[smp]

(2) If you want to do a byte level copy of the image file RT11RL53.DSK why not just mount it on TU58EM using the -r option? That is basically what you would end up with by doing the device byte copy is PUTR.

Hi Don,

Thanks for your comments.

Well, I have tried that (my posts are usually lengthy enough, so I left some things out this time). I started the TU58 emulator with the -r option on the file RT11RL53.dsk, attached to my PDP-11/23 system, then I booted up the PDP-11/23 system from my SCSI disk drive into XXDP. I issued the BOOT DD0: command, and I watched as the four clusters of 128 bytes each were sent from the emulator to the system. Then everything stopped.

I thought: if this RT11RL53.dsk file is a bootable RL02 image, then the boot code I just saw go into my system probably was trying to find a RL02 disk controller to boot from. I then thought if I could copy this file to the TU-58 emulator, perhaps I could make a file that would be bootable from the emulator... Never mind. It was just another of my bone head moves, not completely thought through.

It would appear that I need to take a copy of the RT11RL53.dsk file and put a proper boot code file into it in order to make it bootable from the TU-58 emulator. I think that PUTR can do this with the COPY/BOOT command. I just do not know what file to get a hold of to copy into the disk image. Can anyone tell me what that file is, and offer a pointer to obtain it, or a list of actions to take in order to get this done?

Finally, I remember that some file (perhaps the DD.SYS file?) needs to be replaced in RT-11 so that it will handle TU-58 images larger than 256 KB. Is this the same file that I need for the boot process? If so, I can get the file I need from Will's Works:

http://www.willsworks.net/pdp11/tu58-emu.htm

Please let me know if I am on a good track now, or not.

Thanks!
smp