Bootstrap Idea

[Allison J Parent]

Hi,

RE: booting

<	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

Depending on the hardware many of the qbus 11s have ODT, MOP(serial line),
MOP(sync line), TU58, rx01/2 and tu58 boots in rom.  It's handy to untilize 
this.  I will not comment on unibus machines as I'm not experinced on those.

I favor the MOP boot with a mop responder on a PC to load a loader. The key 
is to load small program by hand that loads a more complex loader.

<Other problems: 5th, 6th Edition came as RK05 images. We could probably
<	build images for different drives.

There lies two problems, the drivers expect RK05. The other is the images 
may already expect bad block to either not exist or have been remapped off 
the source device (meaning the BB map copies too).  

<	7th Edition did a mkfs during installation, but I don't know if
<	bad blocks were ever dealt with.

There is s difference between an install and starting up a coped image that 
is an already installed system.

<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.

There is already a program out there that emulates the serial interfaced 
TU58 and while limited by the serial line speed the emulation seeks faster 
than tape as it used ram or file space on disk.

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

Same here for non-pdp systems.


Allison