On Wed, Mar 25,
2009 at 11:06 PM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
On Wed, 25
Mar 2009, John Floren wrote:
I just brought home my spiffy new MicroPDP-11,
hooked it up to my
laptop (couldn't find cables to go to any real terminals) and tried
booting. Right now, all I see at power-on is:
173000
@
I can type things after the @, but it seems that pretty much any
keypress results in a '?' and a new prompt.
I'm a total PDP-11 newb, but the users manual implied that I should be
seeing some sort of post-ish procedure similar to what you get on a
VAX. Any ideas?
What boards are in the system? Is the CPU dual or quad height? What board
is the terminal hooked to? IIRC, this indicates you're lacking a bootstrap.
If we know what boards, and drives you have we can probably better advise
you.
Zane
This is on a KDJ11-A (dual height). I've just been reading the manual
and yes, as Josh notes, it seems that I'm in the ODT prompt. Do I just
want to try "P" and see what happens?
Right now I have the drives disconnected, but it has the standard dual
5.25" floppy drives and Maxtor XT-2190 (190 MB) drive in it. At the
moment, I have the power supply to the drives disconnected because I
wanted to make sure I could get to a boot prompt sort of thing without
spinning up and spinning down the hard drive all the time--I also
wanted to avoid having it start booting RT-11 while I'm not watching
the console.
Currently the card stack looks like:
[ dual-height KDJ11-A ] [empty] [empty]
[ board connected to serial lines] [empty] [empty]
[ Three connected boards that I believe are ]
[ extra hardware installed by the lab ]
[ ]
[ another board
Jerome Fine replies:
My best guess is that you have a BA23 box since you seem to be describing
having two 5 1/4" drives included in your configuration.
Since RT-11 is quite happy to boot with the drives in WRITE PROTECT,
I suggest that you attempt to figure out the "sort of" front panel which
allows
that to be done for the RD54 (Maxtor XT-2190). If you have a floppy as
well, place a WRITE PROTECT tab on it.
If you can also provide the names of the boards, that would be more helpful.
With a KDJ11-A (dual) CPU which does not have an boot ROMs, you may
have a third party controller for the drives with a boot ROM. Otherwise, if
you have an RQDX3 (M7555 dual board - required for an RD54) which
does not have a boot ROM and there is no other board with a boot ROM,
you will have to enter the boot program via ODT. Since this takes only
about
5 minutes to do, it is not an impossible situation.
Any other question?
Jerome Fine
