Problem Installing Ultrix on DECstation 2100

I am pretty sure the DECstation 2100/3100 is old enough that it requires a 512 byte sector CD-ROM to boot and/or install properly. I find some of the older DEC machines are kind of picky... using a genuine DEC RRD drive will almost guarantee you to succeed; early CD-ROM drives from other workstation vendors of the same era (i.e. Sun) are also good bets. Most drives you will pull from Macs or PCs of the era are set up to do 2048 byte sectors and are no good for booting the old workstations (though they may work as a simple peripheral to read CD-ROMs after the fact). In fact, exactly this sort of thing happened last time I loaded a VAXstation 3100 (with VMS, but, same principle) over the summer... IIRC, I tried to boot it with a Sun drive first (note: 512 byte sector drive!) and it actually booted the miniroot OK, but it always would fail when trying to restore the save set to the disk. It only worked all the way through once I put the Sun drive away and started using a DEC RRD45. Use an AppleCD 300 (2048 byte sectors) and it won't even boot the miniroot. So, just an example of exactly how picky they can be ;) I kind of miss my old DECstation 2100/3100s... Had a few maybe 15 years ago. I ran NetBSD on mine... they were slower than dirt but I always enjoyed staring into that big old black hole of a monitor that was the VR290 hooked up to it... and I just love that font that DEC used for text mode. I didn't think of it as such at the time, but the machine is kind of historically significant; I think it was one of the first MIPS based machines to sell in real volume. Best, Sean On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 7:58 PM, Peter C. Wallace <pcw at mesanet.com> wrote: