[Info-vax] Disk image viewable in Windows/Linux

[Hans Vlems]

On Aug 6, 2:03 pm, Paul Sture <paul.nos... at sture.ch> wrote:
> In article <j1iuf0$n4... at speranza.aioe.org>,
>  Wilm Boerhout <wboerhout-rem... at this-gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Neither PersonalAlpha nor CHARON-AXP nor CHARON-VAX nor SIMH add
> > metadada to disk containers. These containers are interchangeable with
> > LD-created containers. It's just a load of bytes.
>
> > So you can create a container with LD, $INIT it and fill it with data,
> > then dismount and disconnect the container, ftp /binary it to the
> > outside world, where all mentioned products (and probably a few others)
> > will happily see it as a disk container file.
>
> I think we've found the cause of the confusion.  The OP seems to think
> that these products create something akin to the container files used by
> VMware, Virtual PC, VirtualBox et al.
>
> The VAX and Alpha emulators just allocate a bunch of blocks and present
> them to VMS to do with as it wishes.
>
> Provided that the original VMS disk is a model recognized by the
> emulator you are using, I see no reason why you could not put it on a
> *nix system and use "dd" to create a file containing a physical copy,
> and use that in an emulator.
>
> @Sum1:
>
> I would recommend that after creating your LD container you perform an
> INIT/ERASE to ensure that the container is pre-filled with zeroes, and
> doesn't just pick up a load of garbage.
>
> --
> Paul Sture

Correct. Out of curiosity I tried this. Made a dd transfer of a VAX/
VMS V7.3 disk on a
Tru64 system. Copied it to VMS and mounted it with LD: worked. That
same file was
also burned on a CD and the CD was bootable (for a VAX of course).
Burning a physical backup image resulted in a CD that couldn't be read
though.
Hans