Bootstrap Idea

Warren Toomey wkt at henry.cs.adfa.oz.au
Fri Sep 12 09:31:22 AEST 1997


All,
	I had an idea about bootstrapping images into PDP-11s, please shoot
it down! Ok, I don't know much about the -11 hardware, how hard would it
be to bootstrap as follows:

	hand-toggle in a small bit of code, which
	sucks in a bigger bootstrap over a serial line, which
	then can pull in a disk image over the serial line & write to disk

Flaws:	need different bootstraps for different disks
	need different bootstraps for different serial hardware
	how to deal with bad blocks?
	very slooow

Other problems: 5th, 6th Edition came as RK05 images. We could probably
	build images for different drives.
	7th Edition did a mkfs during installation, but I don't know if
	bad blocks were ever dealt with.

Anyway, this solution would allow a simple program + disk images to be
put on your nearby PC running Linux/whatever, so no tapes or tape drives
would be required.

I've used this method on another hardware platform to move disk images
in/out. It is slow, but it works.

	Warren

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