[Simh] 3.8-2 rc2 Windows XP disk access issue

[Mark Benson]

I appear to be having a bit of a problem with SimH VAX 3.8-2 rc2 and disk image access. I am using an old PIII 933MHz duel CPU workstation with 1GB RAM and XP SP2. I have the required VC++ Runtimes installed and Winpcap. I sourced the binaries from Mark Pizzolato.

I have run it using a fresh RA90 disk image attached at RQ0 (generated by the emulator on startup). It boots from a VMS 7.3 ISO fine but when I try and do any heavy lifting from the disk image, like restore the 7.3 save_set to it form the CD using 'backup' it'll eventually error out (VMS backup reports the device is not writable) and the emulator will stop dead and the disk will be flat out with activity, but no CPU usage and nothing else going on in Windows. I can only get it to stop by restarting Windows XP (at which point VAX.exe eventually dies and the machine reboots). I have no Anti-virus on the machine as it's only used for DEC related stuff, I don't surf the web on it or read my e-mail (in short there's no malware on it either). 

I've surfaced scanned the physical hard drive in the machine and it appear to be error free, it seems the emulator. I have had no other issues with installing software, copying and moving files etc. I'm kinda stumped.

Any ideas?

-- 

Mark Benson

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