> On Feb 1, 2018, at 1:56 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 1 Feb 2018, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>> I guess they trusted the disk enough. Normal practice would be to save the
>> dayfile to a regular disk file periodically (perhaps as part of daily
>> maintenance), at which point you could print it, or archive it to tape, or
>> whatever else comes to mind.
>
> Was there typically any other way to access the disk file, such as if the
> system were down?
> It could be useful in troubleshooting, such as if the system were down.
Not that I know of. The file system structure was quite trivial so it would be
easy to write a standalone inspect tool but I don't remember any such thing.
> At least they would not have had "Help" to suggest, "If the system will not
> IPL/Boot, then run Troubleshooting Wizard"
That at least isn't an issue, since deadstart (CDC for "IPL") was traditionally
done from magnetic tape, and could also load from other media if needed.
paul
