OpenVMS files in Windows

[Dhanasekar]

Hi,
I need to retrieve some .txt file created with OpenVMS on windows, the data is available in floppy, is it possible retrieve floppy created in OpenVMS system on windows.

Thankyou

[Joseph Huber_1]

Welcome to the VMS forum!

Floppies, really ?
I don't know if there are tools to read Files11 floppies on Windows (I don't have my Windows PC accessible here, but once tried to use some ODS2 reader program to read VMS format CDs without success).

My suggestion: write the floppy on VMS with one of the FAT format tools available from freeware and open source tools:
two of them are PCX and MTOOLS.

MadGoat PCX was written by Matt Madison and is currently maintained by Hunter Goatley.
(look to the VMS repository at process.com).

Mtools is a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from
Unix without mounting them. It supports Win'95 style long file
names.

VMS version maintained by Steven Schweda,
http://antinode.info/dec/sw/mtools.html

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] OpenVMS [...]

Not a very detailed description of your
hardware or software.

> Floppies, really ?

A fair question.

> My suggestion: write the floppy [...]

My suggestion (if you have an Alpha or IA64
system with a PCI bus and reasonably recent
VMS): Use a USB flash EEPROM storage gizmo
instead of a floppy.

> http://antinode.info/dec/sw/mtools.html

Works for me (with a floppy or a USB thing).

[Lucifer Megacruel]

Hi ,

Not very easy but create an a image of the floppy using winimage or dd for windows. Then you need to use the ReadFile Windows API to read the floppy disk image sector by sector and parse the file system contents.

Going through FreeVMS ODS2 implementation might give you some clues.
http://www.freevms.net/IMG/gz/ods2_0-9-3-w9-tar.gz

Truly Evil
Lucifer Megacruel

[Joseph Huber_1]

IF the OP has no choice but to retrieve the data from the floppies, maybe this discussion has a solution:

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/General/ODS2-Disks-under-Windows-XP/m-p/5111206#M25669

or Hunters page for Windows tools:
http://www.goatley.com/hunter/w2k.html

[Dhanasekar]

Could copy files through Ods2_win32.exe downloaded from http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv.com?ODS2 .

Thank you all

[Stanley F Quayle]

These answers assume that the floppies are 5.25 or 3.5 inch. 8 inch was popular before both of those.

If you have 8 inch floppies, you're going to have to go to a specialty shop to read them. Even OnTrack Data Recovery doesn't have 8 inch drives anymore.

I get requests from time to time, but assembling a system would cost about $5,000. Just not worth it for me...