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Problem writing boot block for BSD2.11 on PDP-11/53

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acollins22

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 12, 2007
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257
Location
Leicester, UK
Hello everyone,

I've been trying to setup BSD2.11 on my 11/53 with a SCSI2SD and have mostly succeeded except I can't get the boot record in or at least it won't boot from the SD card.

I built the image using SIMH and the instructions in "Installing and Operating 2.11BSD on the PDP-11" by Steven Schultz and copied it across to the SD card. I put the card in my PDP and tried to boot it but it did the test counts and displayed "DU0" and got no further.

I then discovered VTserver and the article " VTserver: Installing a PDP-11 UNIX with No Tape Drive" by Warren Toomey. I started going down the path of a new installation but found out after testing a hunch that I had a good BSD installation on my SD card but it would only boot if I started the boot process using VTserver first.

Instructions in "Installing and Oper..." say that in order to get the machine to boot automatically you must write a boot record from within a working BSD using the command :-
dd if=/mdec/boot of=/dev/rdk0a count=1

For me i think boot is rauboot and dk is ra. So for me the command is :-

dd if=/mdec/rauboot of=/dev/rra0a count=1

I have tried this several times but the machine still won't boot.

Can someone shed some light on this please?


Thanks,

Andy.
 
What SCSI controller are you using?

If you are using a CMD CQD, you need a boot block patch to boot 2.11BSD
 
Hello gslick,

Thanks for that. Yes, it is a CMD CQD controller.

I'll work through that and report back.


Cheers,

Andy.
 
The 2.11BSD patches are currently available here:

www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patches/

All of the patches through #431 have already been applied to the standard distribution.

If you apply the patches in SIMH it doesn't take long to install them.

Attached is a PATCHES.TAP file that can be mounted on a SIMH tape
drive. It contains a TAR of the scripts for patches 432 through 445.

Also included is a log of a SIMH session showing how I extracted the
individual patch scripts 432 through 445 into a directory I created on
the running SIMH system, then installed the patches one by one, with
some shutdown and reboots along the way. It looks like I skipped
installing patch 445 as that one is for systems without floating
point, which shouldn't be necessary for a KDJ11 system.
 

Attachments

  • PATCHES.zip
    75.8 KB · Views: 1
Hi qslick,

Thanks for the patches tar and the log. I have been working on this but not got very far.
My first problem came when I tried using Simh. I can't see the TAP image from Unix inside Simh.

Here is my Simh config file...
set tto 7b

set ts enable
set rq enable

set RK disable
set HK disable
set TC disable
set TM disable

attach ts PATHCHES.TAP

; It doesn't seem to like 4 megabytes
set cpu 3072k
attach rq media/root.dsk
boot rq
Click to expand...

I am expecting PATCHES.TAP to be mounted on /dev/rmt12 but that doesn't seem to be the case.
# cd /usr/src/patches
# mt rew
# tar xpbf 20 /dev/rmt12
ts0: hard error bn0 xs0=40152<RLS,ONL,IES,PED,BOT> xs3=100<OPI>
tar: tape read error: Input/output error
#
Click to expand...
Am I doing something wrong here?


Thanks,

Andy
 
Hello Folks,

Sorry about the delay in getting back here to report my progress. This has been a bit more involved than I first thought as my original installation of BSD in Simh was faulty and kept doing a core dump when I tried to access the virtual tape drive.

I reinstalled from the distribution but had troubles with partition sizes so it was third time lucky. I applied the patches in order, start to finish without any problems.

So now, thanks to gslick's great advice and very useful log I now can boot from my 11/53 from an SD card in a SCSI to SD card adapter on my CMD CQD controller.


Thanks very much,

Cheers,

Andy.
 
acollins22 said:
So now, thanks to gslick's great advice and very useful log I now can boot from my 11/53 from an SD card in a SCSI to SD card adapter on my CMD CQD controller.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the update and glad you got it working. I ran into the same issue the first time I tried to get 2.11BSD installed using a CMD CQD SCSI controller and it took me a while to find the solution back then. Maybe posting the info here will save others some time if they also run into the issue in the future.

(And if someone follows along with my log of applying the 2.11BSD patches, they don't need to replicate the typos along the way that I didn't bother editing out of the log).
 
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