New freeware utility moves STD files
January 7, 2013
It's been more than two weeks since we've written about the new HP 3000 emulator, the Charon HPA/3000. While you were away over the holiday, wizards have been busy installing and extending the Stromasys solution for the future of 3000 utility. One even designed software to assist in moving data off a 3000's disks and onto the virtualized 3000.
Keven Miller of 3K Ranger found his setup of the freeware Charon virtualized system set back a little. As he described the problem, he announced a solution.
In the process of setting up my Charon HPA/3000 VM box, I noted that I could not put an MPE STD file into the LDEV7 file and restore from it.
Not a huge setback, but one I thought someone might find a need for a solution. It would use TAPECOPY to create STDs from tapes, and have those STD files ready to restore from. This would create accessable backup tape-files.
So I introduce a utilty for this purpose: HPASTDX - An HPA/3000 Charon utility. This will convert MPE's STD (Store-to-disk) files to/from HPA/3000 Tape Image files.
As noted in my brief text file with the program, this version 1.01 has not been tested on files larger than 2GB. Charon is noted to support files larger than 4GB, ones for a Tape Image file. At some time, I'll get that much data loaded to test a STORE/RESTORE of that size.
See http://www.3kranger.com/3ksoftw.shtm under MPE Software item 14, and also under Unix Software item 5 (the Unix version of hpastdx).
I might be going out on a limb here, but this probably won't be the last freeware utility written for the users of the Stromasys VM solution. Creating utilities is just how the 3000 community rolls (their own).