30 Sep
2007
30 Sep
'07
8:50 a.m.
Liam,
On 9/30/07, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
Well, last night, I went and collected my first ever
DEC box. It's a
VAXstation 3100/38, bought on eBay for 99p (UK?0.99).
[2] Friends have commented to me that a VAX of this age won't be able
to boot from CD-ROM. Somewhere, I have a hobbyist VMS CD, if I can
find it. It's been suggested to me that the easiest way to install
would be to install VMS onto SIMH on my PC, netboot the VAXstation off
the simulated VAX and install from one to the other. This sounds
moderately hairy to me. I'm not a VMS virgin but I've not used it in
15y or so and I've never installed a machine from scratch - I just did
day-to-day sysop duties.
Congratulations, by the way. :-)
I went a slightly different route, lacking an appropriate CD-ROM
drive: I installed OpenVMS/VAX 7.2 Hobbyist onto a SIMH disk image,
then DD'd the image onto a real SCSI drive in Unix. My 3100 M38
booted off the hard drive and has been quite happy since.
Installing from scratch isn't that hard. There are a few tutorials
(geared for SIMH) that'll get you started online, like this one:
http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html
...Josef
--
"I laugh because I dare not cry. This is a crazy world
and the only way to enjoy it is to treat it as a joke."
-- Hilda "Sharpie" Burroughs,
"The Number of the Beast" by Robert A. Heinlein