31 Mar
2001
31 Mar
'01
8:40 p.m.
At 12:57 AM 4/1/01 -0500, Chad wrote:
I re-tried a 2 line phone cable I bought at Lowes. I
filed the
connectors down so I could plug them into the MMJ ports. This time it
worked. I must have had everything else mixed up, last time I tried
this cable.
I am now wandering aimlessly around the console monitor. Anything I
should do while here? I don't know how to do much, but I did find that
I could "show mem" and it reports 44megs of ram. I also did "show
qbus",
but it didn't tell me much. I was hoping it would tell me what cards I
have installed, and what they are.
Most excellent progress. A useful command is 'SHOW DEVICE' which will tell
you what devices and more importantly what type of disks you have installed.
44M means you have 40 MB + the on-board 4MB on the KA640 CPU. Thus you have
a fairly rare 32MB memory card and an 8MB card installed, or you have two
16's and an 8. I'm betting though its the former.
Next look at all the cards that are installed from the front and write down
the 'M' numbers and post them to the list, we'll ID them for you. If there
are blank connectors, be sure to remove those and look behind them,
sometimes cards have no external connection.
I did boot the machine... well sort of. It tells me
that it has OpenVMS
Vax version 6.2, major version 1, minor version 0. It also reports
pagefile.sys, not found. The licenses are expired, it was shutdown
improperly, the disk is full, and that a whole bunch of files are
inaccessible, and then eventually goes back to the >>> prompt.
Sounds like one of the disks was pulled (which usually means that part of
the system was installed on a disk in an expansion box) Normally, a good
sys admin will make sure that the box can boot without any external disks
attached but that isn't always possible.
What now?
Well, since its bootable you should probably install a new copy of the OS
on it. Either VMS or NetBSD will work fine on the machine. (a better
variety of languages in VMS and its more authentic) Install media is easier
to get for NetBSD and its license free.
It will be useful to determine if you have a SCSI interface in this machine
as that would enable you to use a SCSI CD-ROM to install software (much
faster than tape!)
--Chuck