[Simh] how to move vms backup tapes to the emulator

[Andreas Cejna]

Hi Rick,

you don't need to stop the emulator completely. Hitting CTRL-E on the console window sends you to the simh-console. You can attach and detach files from your tape units there and then continue your emulation with the CONT command. 

As far as I know simh allows you to emulate 8 tape drives using two controllers. So you are able to access 8 tapes in parallel once you have attached these files to your tape units.

Do you have access to the tape-unit on the system that runs simh? Another possible way would be to attach the tape-unit directly to simh.

regards
Andreas Cejna


Am Fr 29.10.2004 00:50 schrieb Rick Caldwell <rickc at dallas.oilfield.slb.com>:

> 
> I have several vms tapes in backup format that I would like to move to 
> the Vax emulator.   I'm looking
> for a smooth way to do this.  From the doc it appears I could read tapes 
> in tpc format but this would
> require stopping the emulator to attach the file and restarting the 
> emulator if I understand how the
> attach works (at least I think the tape image file is opened when 
> attached so once the emulation is
> started the file is attached to the simulated device rather than opening 
> and closing on allocation
> and deallocation so you could replace the file with the emulator 
> running).   It would also seem that
> I would need to find a way to first convert the tape to tpc format 
> without a Vax.  As I have several tapes to
> read and more than 1 user this probably wouldn't work to well.  There 
> seem to be several utilities in
> the tools subdirectory of the simh distribution but they don't seem to 
> do what I would like to do from
> what documentation there is.
> 
> Another thought is to build the vmsbackup.c program on unix/linux and 
> read the tape and save to disk,
> then run vmsbackup again to make a on disk saveset which then could be 
> ftp'ed to the emulator and then
> backup could then be run in the emulator on the backup saveset.  Most of 
> this could be scripted but it seems
> like a lot of steps and a lot of temp disk space so was wondering if 
> someone had a better solution .
> 
> Rick
> 
> -- 
> Have you noticed that a "slight tax increase" costs us at least two
> hundred dollars a year, but a "substantial tax cut" saves us maybe thirty cents?
> 
> rickc at dallas.oilfield.slb.com
> 
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