Installing PDP-11 UNIX w. no tape - solution

[Warren Toomey]

Hi all,

	Last year I mentioned the idea of installing PDP-11 UNIX over a
serial line, for those people who have real PDP-11s but no tape drives.

I've written the code to do this over the past few days, and its time to
pass it to someone who actually has a PDP-11 and no tape drive! The code
is of course alpha-quality, but I'm using a PC running John Wilson's Ersatz
to install 7th Edition on a simulated RK05 right now.

I need someone who has a:

	+ PDP-11 which _will_ run 7th Edition
	+ Spare RK05, RP03, RP04, RP05 or RP06 disk
	+ A DL/KL-11 serial port at vector 0176500 (i.e 2nd unit)
	+ An RS-232 null modem with hardware handshaking lines
	+ A machine running a 32-bit Unix to host the other end of the
	  serial connection
	+ Spare time, and a tendency for masochism :-)

Someone who also has a PDP-11 running v7, and a source license would
be a bonus, as they might be able to help with the debugging.

I'm at the point where I can bring in the `boot' file (record 0) off the
simulated UNIX install tape, load and run cat, mkfs, icheck and restor.

I get some error messages with restor (``Missing address (header) block''),
which I believe are to do with the 10,240 byte record requests from restor.
My code expects 512-byte requests, and I'm doing 20 a time to fulfill the
10,240 request, but still problems.

Once the code is solid, I'd like to add other disks (RL02s etc.), and write
a user-mode program to read from the tape once UNIX has booted off disk.
This will allow other tape formats (e.g tar) to be read in.

If anybody would be willing to participate in getting this stuff to work
well, could they e-mail me next week?!

Thanks in advance,

	Warren	wkt at cs.adfa.oz.au

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