[Simh] Imaging SCSI HD's

[Zane Healy]

I have a DL380 on the way to add to my ESXI cluster here at home.  As a result I’m looking to finish virtualizing my DEC HW.  What is the best way to convert a physical SCSI HD to a disk image for SIMH?  I need to do this for both VAX and PDP-11.

One of the main systems that I want to Virtualize is a VAXstation 4000/60 with a BA350 shelf.  The only HD connected to the system is a RZ28-VA SBB (2GB) as DKA200:, so yesterday I added a RZ29-VA SBB (4GB) as DKA100:.  I setup Standalone Backup on the RZ29 and booted into Standalone backup.

I tried to run the following:
backup/image/verify dka200: dka100:[000000]20190420-system.sav/sav

I ended up with a very strange “No valid storage bitmap found” error, and it failed to copy anything.

Facility: BACKUP, Backup Utility 
Explanation: Software bad block data is not present on the volume. The volume has been initialized with no bad blocks. 
User Action: Execute the Bad Block Locator utility before using the volume.
NOBITMAP, no valid storage bitmap found on 'device-name’

I tried ANALYZE/MEDIA, but may not have been doing things right.  This is a Genuine RZ29-VA, but it was originally used as part of a disk array for a Sun Sparc system.

My one thought is to see if any of the old Sun hardware I have around here will power up (I haven’t touched any of them in a decade or more), and to use ‘dd’ to image the Hard Drives.  Actually at that point, it would probably make more sense to bring up an AlphaStation 200 4/233 running UNIX temporarily, as I want to convert one of my two into an OpenVMS Workstation.  I need to see if either of them run, as like the Sun HW, it’s been over a decade.

Thoughts/suggestions?

Zane