[Simh] Using an ODS-2 physical SCSI drive with simh

[Christian Brunschen]

If you have the option to do so, I would suggest making a byte-by-byte dump
of the contents of the drive (a disk image), and putting that disk image
somewhere safe and read-only; then, use a copy of that disk image for any
experimentation. That way you're firstly reducing any wear on the drive
itself, only reading data from it, once; and you're not risking any damage
to the data, since you're working on a copy of the original which is safely
stored elsewhere, and you can always start over with a fresh copy of the
original at any point.

Also, if your host computer is fairly modern, a disk image may actually be
a lot faster to access than the original SCSI drive.

// Christian


On 28 June 2015 at 11:38, Peter Allan <petermallan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know that you can use a physical SCSI drive with simh by using the RAW
> device. However, before doing so, I want to check something.
>
> The drive that I have is a 9GB SCSI drive that was formatted and written
> to on an Alpha workstation that runs VMS 7.2-1. The disk structure on the
> drive is ODS-2.
>
> My question is - will using the drive as a RAW drive in simh let me access
> the existing file structure on the disk? I want to use the vax (microVAX
> 3900) simulator.
>
> Is it safe to write to the drive or might that mangle the file structure?
>
> Are there "gotchas" to watch out for, such as needing to tell simh the
> exact size of the drive?
>
> All comments gratefully received.
>
> Peter Allan
>
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