Copy Simh disk image to physical disk using a Unibone

[Michael Thompson]

Copying a disk image over a 9600 baud console port using PDP-11 GUI works perfectly, but takes hours. It would be really convenient if the Unibone had a tool that would write a disk image to a physical disk. I am a complete Unibone novice, so writing this tool is way beyond my capability.

[Peter Schranz]

I would write a small PDP-11 program that copies the disk image from the emulated disk on the Unibone to the real disk. Presumably they both have the same geometry and thus you just need to loop over all heads/cylinders, reading first a track from Unibone and then writing to real controller/disk. 

[Michael Thompson]

We found that RT11 will copy between a physical disk and a disk image. We booted RT11 on a PDP-11/40 from an RA80 on Simh, mount an RL02 image of UNIX V6, did a copy/device/files to copy the RL02 pack to an RT11 file. We then used the RT11 RA80 image to emulate an RA80 drive and controller using the Unibone. We booted RT11 on a real PDP-11/40 from the simulated RA80 on the Unibone, and then used the command copy/device/files/ to copy the RT11 image of the RL02 to a physical RL02. We were then able to boot UNIX V6 from the real RL02 drive on a real PDP-11/40.