[Info-vax] Valid disk types for SIMH?

[Paul Sture]

In article <00881af7$0$17034$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>,
 JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote:

> Paul Sture wrote:
> 
> > FWIW doing an INIT /ERASE on a 30GB disk took about 1 hour 10 minutes on 
> > my 1.5 GHZ PowerBook. I might play with some FDL file placement to speed 
> > things up here :-)
> 
> 
> is it really necesssary ?
> 
> If the underlying file system is smart enough to give you a brand
> spanking "fresh off the press" block filled with steaming zeros topped
> with whipped cream whenever you request a block that has not yet been
> allocated, wouldn't the emulated VAX still see a 30 gig drive  where any
> unwritten blocks are filled with 0s, no matter where they might be ?
> 

What triggered my interest here was the possibility of running out of 
free space in VMS/SIMH when you _think_ you have plenty to go at.

I did try an INIT/INDEX=END on a disk which was too big for the 
available free space and it chucked me back to the sim> prompt. Typing a 
'c' at that point brought me back into VMS and issued an I/O error, but 
I didn't know what would happen until I tried it.

-- 
Paul Sture