[Simh] Unix SYS III on SIMH

[Ethan Dicks]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Jason Stevens <neozeed at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, I was wondering if anyone has ever installed UNIX SYSIII on the 780 emulator?

I have not tried it, but it sounds like fun.  Once, looooong ago, I
did the real thing, but on an 11/750.

> The tape I've peiced together with the bits from Al Kossow's dat files
> from the TUHS thing...

 If the tape proves to be an issue, somewhere in my boxes of magtape, I
 have an official SysIII dist tape from about 26 years ago.  I doubt
 the contents are unique, and I'm not sure it could still be read, but
 it might worth trying (or even just reading to see what matches what
 you done and what does not).

> a carriage return or line feed.
> There is no type-ahead -- wait for the question to complete.
> The character '@' will kill the entire line

> Anyways any pointers here would be nice........

My memory of the process is that a) different distros had specific
instructions, so you just about had to have the printed instructions
or at least had to have done one particular distro enough that you
memorized them, and b) in the case of a BSD tape at least, some of the
instructions and a "cat" program were on the tape prior to the root
filesystem,

It's odd you get a hard tape error at block 7000 unless that happens
to be the size of your virtual tape file.  How large is
tape1_set1_file1.dat and how large is it compared to tape1.tap?

Tape block 7000 should be around 35840000 bytes (or 70000 blocks of
512 bytes)., and a real RP06 should be able to hold 322278 blocks of
512 bytes (165006336 bytes) IIRC.  With about 35MB read, it sounds
like the install/restore program could be is running off the end of
the virtual tape (a "real" 16MT9 holds around 40MB, ISTR). so it
sounds to me as if something in the tape EOF marker
creation/detectionis busted.  Do you have a way to verify that
mkdistap.pl is writing EOFs in a way that simh is happy with the .tap
file?  Perhaps the
program at the start of the tape is doing something "clever" and not
properly seeing the EOF marker between tape1_set1_file1.dat and
tape1_set1_file2.dat.  Do you have source for that program you can
examine for how it knows when to stop reading from the tape?

That's where I'd start.

-ethan