One of the major problems i had with my pdp11/53 was to format the winchester drive. Since the original drive was destroyed i had to replace it. On winchester drives things are not as easy as on modern drives. The drive has to be low-level formatted before the operating system can make use of it. Fortunately some other guy had solved [1] the problem already on the exact same machine. The formatter is loaded via the ODT-Prompt directly into the pdp11. I wrote a program [2] to make the process quicker. Now you can boot into the zrqc within minutes. [1] http://codehosting.net/blog/blogengine/post/XXDP-booting-via-ODT.aspx [2] http://runningserver.com/software/pdp11tool.tar Note: In the video i have pointed out that it is better to use the ST225 instead of an S251. My plan was to create a backup of the empty disk using VTserver, install RT11 on it using the emulator and then playing it back to the pdp11 using VTserver as well. The ST225 (20MB) is smaller so the process would be half as long as with an ST251 (40MB). Unfortunately VTserver failed to play the image back. Anyway, this is not the only way to install RT11. See also: http://diskettenschlitz.de/misc/rqdx3-format-howto.txt

• published: 20 Aug 2013
• views: 12