[Info-vax] Attaching an actual 3.5" floppy drive to SIMH-VAX RXV21 device?

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 09 Aug 2012 09:30:55 -0400, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> AFAIK, simh doesn't "do" physical device presentations.  There's no
> direct device I/O pass-through mechanism.   Nor would that pass-through
> really work, as there would need be something to convert the OpenVMS I/O
> activities within the address range that OpenVMS "thinks" is the
> controller chips, since how a VAX accesses its floppy drive junk I/O
> controller is undoubtedly different than how a PC box accesses its Junk
> I/O path.
> 
> The easiest working approach for reading the media contents would be to
> dd the floppy contents over into disk images, and connect those disk
> images.

FWIW I have always taken that approach with CDs in SimH.  I haven't tried 
this in many years, but earlier versions of OS X (or was it something in 
my setup?) would simply eject a VMS boot CD with an unrecognisable format 
message before SimH could attach to it.

I used a real VMS system to copy the VMS installation media to disk via 
LDDRIVER and transferred the resulting image to the Mac over the network.

-- 
Paul Sture