1 Dec
2011
1 Dec
'11
11:35 p.m.
Mouse [mouse at rodents-montreal.org] wrote:
Many such systems will work fine with disks over 1G;
they'll
just be able to use only the first 1G of them. (This assumes
software can be told to use only part of a drive's
self-reported capacity, which of course may not be so in your case.)
OpenVMS will not work properly on (affected) VAXstation 3100s with
a system disk over 1G in size.
OpenVMS uses the console disk driver during early boot and during a
crash (to write the crashdump file). When presented with an address
1G the console disk driver "wraps around"
(i.e. uses address MOD 1G).
That prevents a successful boot, although you can work around it by
very carefully arranging for the critical parts to be on an appropriate
part of the disk (you also need to ensure that they don't move).
If the dump file (or pagefile, depending on how you are configured)
fails to meet the restirctions, then *writes* go to the wrong place
on crash. That's somewhat worse than failing to boot ...
Antonio
arcarlini at iee.org