got netbsd 2.0.3 to boot on 11/730 in sim

Very cool - congrats! [snip] [snip] Too big? C'mon, it's only 1200 lbs. (550 kg) or so.... As an interesting coincidence, I just got a VAX-11/780-5 to boot into VMS (yesterday!). After doing a careful restoration of the potentially broken bits (power supplies and such), I got the machine running diagnostics. N.B.: you need to be sure to have the *right* diagnostics for your machine and its components. Just because the diskette says it's a diagnostic for an 11/785 doesn't mean it will match your hardware. The available literature on the versioning leaves something to be desired; I think DEC assumed they'd give you a set of floppies matched to your machine and you'd be happy evermore. (If you're undertaking this and want to know more about what I learned, please drop me an email.) Getting VMS going was a challenge because of peripherals. The machine has a RH780, but we are using our RP06s on our PDP-10s; our RP07s all need restoration; and we don't have enough power in the room where the VAX lives to run one. The machine also has a CI780, so I suggested using a hierarchical storage controller. We briefly considered a HSC, but decided against investing in RA drives. :-) So we picked up an HSJ50 from PSDS in Woodinville, Washington - really great people for old DEC stuff. They built it out for us with a full complement of RZ29s in Storageworks shelves - which was a mixed blessing.... When we decided to go the HSJ route, I figured we'd have a controller, perhaps a single shelf and then be able to plug in a CDROM and/or magtape drive into the unused ports. The system PSDS built for us is FULLY built out, with six shelves and RAID arrays done properly - vertically, across the shelves. So I had no free ports. I tried a couple of simple ideas, not wanting to completely disassemble the system, but I was facing the idea of restructuring the RAID arrays to free up a shelf, unplugging that shelf from the HSJ and plugging in the CDROM. Yuck. What I ended up doing was easier and worked out well. I used a MicroVAX (3100) setup with a single Storageworks shelf and a CDROM drive. I booted the MicroVAX into standalone backup and restored the install save set onto an RZ29; I also copied the entire CD onto another RZ. I reduced a couple of RAID storagesets on the HSJ, installed the RZs from the MicroVAX and was able to boot from then! There was one interesting bit of learning curve on this. I was unable to get standalone backup to boot on the VAX-11/780-5, despite having a set of disks for that purpose: the VAX-11 never 'saw' the stuff on the HSJ. I verified that CI was working correctly (while SABU was running I disabled the CI ports at the HSJ and SABU complained), but still couldn't access devices. So I tried simply booting, using CIBOO.CMD on the console disk. One challenge was figuring out the device number: R2 contains the CI node(s) and R3 contains the unit number at that node (or in the case of our dual-redundant setup, nodes). It wasn't clear what that number would be: SCSI ID, shelf ID, some conflation of the two? I finally figured out something that wasn't clear from the HSJ documentation: the unit IDs are NOT arbitrary labels. Keep in mind that disks are represented as: disk(s) ---> storageset (RAID, mirror, etc.) ---> unit When I received the storage system, things were set up with disk IDs like DISK100, representing shelf 1, SCSI ID 0, LUN 0; RAID IDs like R0, R1, etc.; and unit IDs of D0, D1 and so forth. After some futzing, I figured out: the unit ID numbers (digits) ARE the IDs to be deposited in the VAX-11's R3 register. So to boot D6 (one of the single-disk units I'd added), R3 <-- 6. Happy dance! So I'm going to rebuild the RAID arrays with full membership and install onto one. I'm going to have more storage than a VAX-11 knows what to do with. :-) And once that's all done, I have a VAX-11/785 that's still ill - yes, we have TWO. Is that cool or what? Cheers -- Ian