29 Aug
2006
29 Aug
'06
9:19 p.m.
On Tuesday 29 August 2006 17:00, Zane H. Healy wrote:
I think that the NetBSD website has instructions on how to set up a
machine to netboot a VAX (mopd, tftpd, nfs, etc). FWIW, after NetBSD
1.5, the boot.mop file they distribute got borked, which wasn't fixed
until either NetBSD 3.0 or the -current branch. It's probably easiest
to just use NetBSD 1.5 to do this.
This is what I do to image 6250/1600bpi magtapes... I've got a TU81+
hooked up to a VAX 4000/300 in my basement, which I netboot NetBSD on,
and use a program I wrote to make images of tapes (mostly because I was
having problems with compiling the other common tape imaging program --
taper? -- on NetBSD).
I also tried this method for RL02 disk packs, but ended up finding a bug
in NetBSD's RL02 driver (it appears to be a DMA address problem), which
I never had time to look at in depth enough to consider fixing. I
ended up just booting VMS (probably 5.3 on that machine) to make RL02
images, which worked beautifully.
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
That said, you
might be able to retrieve the data from there by
booting NetBSD on the uVAX and dd'ing out the network (or heavens!)
the serial port. You should be able to boot NetBSD without writing
anything to the drives. If it has a tape, you could spool out to
it and then try reading it on a more PC-happy tape drive.
How hard is it to setup things to netboot NetBSD in a diskless
configuation? This sounds like the logical solution.