If you have the option to do so, I would suggest making a byte-by-byte dump of the contents of the drive (a disk image), and putting that disk image somewhere safe and read-only; then, use a copy of that disk image for any experimentation. That way you're firstly reducing any wear on the drive itself, only reading data from it, once; and you're not risking any damage to the data, since you're working on a copy of the original which is safely stored elsewhere, and you can always start over with a fresh copy of the original at any point.
Also, if your host computer is fairly modern, a disk image may actually be a lot faster to access than the original SCSI drive. // Christian On 28 June 2015 at 11:38, Peter Allan <[email protected]> wrote: > I know that you can use a physical SCSI drive with simh by using the RAW > device. However, before doing so, I want to check something. > > The drive that I have is a 9GB SCSI drive that was formatted and written > to on an Alpha workstation that runs VMS 7.2-1. The disk structure on the > drive is ODS-2. > > My question is - will using the drive as a RAW drive in simh let me access > the existing file structure on the disk? I want to use the vax (microVAX > 3900) simulator. > > Is it safe to write to the drive or might that mangle the file structure? > > Are there "gotchas" to watch out for, such as needing to tell simh the > exact size of the drive? > > All comments gratefully received. > > Peter Allan > > _______________________________________________ > Simh mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh >
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