VSII/GPX joy (and minor annoyance)

(Hah...Just in time to join in when vax-ownership is asked!) Hello folks, my very first DEC computer has arrived - a VAXstation II/GPX in a BA123 enclosure from Jos Dreesen, which I just brought home from Switzerland last weekend with the help of my parents. Thanks again! The original configuration of the system was: Slot AB CD 1 ----KA630-A CPU---- 2 ----some memory---- 3 ----more memory---- 4 -DELQA- ..empty.. 5 -RQDX3- ..empty.. 6 ----QDSS 4-plane--- 7 ----QDSS 4-plane--- 8 ----QDSS base------ 9-12 .......empty....... 13 ..empty.. -RQ Dist- As to mass storage, there is a RX33 floppy drive in the vertical bay and the system has one HDD frontpanel insert installed. It came with a dead (possibly revivable) RD53, but a fellow collector also gave me a supposedly functional one. I assume the backplane is the original 4x Q/CD, 8x Q/Q thing that belongs in a BA123 as indicated by the lettering in the cardcage. To my understanding, this means the grant chain was broken in slot 5 (after the RQDX3) because there's no board in its CD half. I rearranged the cards so that the RQDX3 now resides in 4AB, the QDSS base board is in 5AD and the DELQA in 8CD (I hope I did get that serpentine configuration right). After correcting an issue with the cardcage fan (which turned out to be just the connector inside the fan tray plugged in backwards!), I hooked up a crufty old laptop as a terminal but didn't get any output as the selftest always got stuck at "A", which corresponds to a keyboard/pointing device problem. This is supposedly normal since I have the VCB02 video option installed but nothing plugged into it. (I have yet to get myself a DEC keyboard, mouse and the BC18Z splitter box cable; at the same time, I'll be looking for a TK drive with controller and any other stuff I can cram in there.) I can get into console I/O mode (chevron prompt) by sending a Break from the terminal but it's a bit annoying that I don't get to see the CPU version banner and the test countdown that way. Shorting pins 8 and 9 on the serial console connector didn't make any difference either (I have read it will cause some VAXstations to use that as console instead of the graphics display) - bit of a bummer considering that any humble SPARCstation who realizes they haven't got a keyboard attached will start using the serial console. I have read the KA630 User's Guide, especially the meaning of the BBU RAM contents, and it doesn't look as if there is anything short of hacking the POST code and burning a new PROM that could be done about it, but if I have overlooked something, I'm all ears. Other than that, I'm off now looking for a MOP server and some netbootable OS image, perhaps NetBSD, for a start... Yours sincerely Arno Kletzander, DEC neophyte ;) -- Arno Kletzander Stud. Hilfskraft Informatik Sammlung Erlangen www.iser.uni-erlangen.de Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser