In the previous post I got the PDP-11 booting from a tape emulator into the diagnostic system, XXDP.

Next I wanted to move on a bit.

I was given some boxes of RX50 diskettes by a friend of mine. DEC kit can be very picky about floppies and generally wants them pre-formatted. The PDP-11 is no exception. It is possible to format them on a PC I believe but I don’t have a PC with a 5.25″ floppy drive.

I booted the PDP into XXDP and then used that to initialise a floppy diskette. this doesn’t format it, just writes some structure to it.

I next used the COPY/BOOT and COPY/FILES commands to make the diskette bootable and have all of the files that are on the tape.

I now have a bootable floppy 🙂