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

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 09 Aug 2012 10:53:34 -0400, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> On 2012-08-09 14:00:57 +0000, Paul Sture said:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Cleaned the dust out of a DVD drive on a OS X 10.6.8 box, tossed in a
> handy Freeware CD disk (and given I know exactly how that disk was
> constructed), got a "this disk is not readable by this computer" dialog
> with an "ignore" and "eject", selected "ignore", and the disk quietly
> sat in the drive.

I got the same on a 10.5.8 system.
 
> Didn't try an xxd of the CD to check readability, though.

I tried using dd on a rather old CD I burned myself and got 241MB off 
before it aborted with an I/O error.

I hadn't come across xxd before.  It looks rather useful:

"xxd  creates a hex dump of a given file or standard input.  It can also
convert a hex dump back to its original binary form.  Like  uuencode(1)
and  uudecode(1)  it allows the transmission of binary data in a `mail-
safe' ASCII representation, but has the advantage of decoding to  stan‐
dard output.  Moreover, it can be used to perform binary file patching."

-- 
Paul Sture