[Info-vax] Ods2 reader utility mount

[Bob Koehler]

In article <A4Qom.76609$Lm6.41895 at newsfe21.ams2>, ChrisQ <blackhole at devnull.com> writes:
> Thanks for that but have already explained that I no longer have a 
> working vax system, so am looking for a way to read the scsi drives via 
> unix or windows. The drive can be seen by both and am pretty sure the 
> drive will be readable. "tossing it in the trash" is not an option :-). 
> Could probably find 9 track backups and still have a working scsi tape 
> drive, but that would be even more complicated. Not even sure if there 
> is a vms backup reader for unix ?.

   There have been a couple of VMS BACKUP readers out there, some are
   commercial, but I think there's one that's free.  The free one might
   now be up to BACKUP's latest tricks, but I don't think you'll need
   tham.

> The problem is that the windows version of Ods2 can't mount the drive 
> without a drive letter, but the disk must be initialised (ie: write to 
> the drive and trash the data) under windows to assign a drive letter. 
> Chicken or egg and thus no luck with the windoze version.

   If you dig deeply enough, you can find the "raw" hardware name that
   Windows knows the device by.  I do that when I'm setting up a NIC
   for SIMH.  Your ODS-2 tool might be able to do that with the disk.