7 Sep
2015
7 Sep
'15
3:37 a.m.
Rod Smallwood wrote:
I thought it might be nice to have a DEC based graphics work station.
I had the Alpha, a high res monitor and the Hobbyist Media CD for
ALPHAVMS 8,3. (yes the system supports 8.3)
SFSG .. So CD in the drive and switch on. First a nice colour graphics
demo/test.
Then the nomal system level stuff. >>> prompt, enter SHO DEV and our CD
drive shows as DKA400 just where it should be.
So Boot DKA400: and off we go. After a while a menu appears from which
you can load layered products you need.
It gets part way through the load and falls over with a data error. The
cd is a real bought and paid for Media CD and is not a copy.
I've come across problems with CD media and/or CD drives in several alphas.
Sometimes cleaning the disks well helped (these were original CONDIST CDs too).
Other times cleaning the CD drive seemed to help but usually only for a while.
More often things quickly got worse and I had to change out the drive.
Before I do a lot of tedious emaling (HP have taken the Hobbyist program
in house) has anybody successfully loaded an Alpha with ALPHA VMS 8.3?
I'm not sure what you mean here. I have ALPHA VMS 8.3 running on a Digital
Personal WorkStation 500a and 8.2 running on an Alphaserver 800 5/500. I'm
sure lots of people are running 8.3 on all sorts of Alphas.
I have two Dec 3000 Model 600 machines but neither works - the LEDs count down
to F0 (IIRC) and that's it. Nothing happens on the console. Both failed in
service, one when I was trying to reboot it remotely. I think they used to run
V6.2 - they've been out of action a long time.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.