Thanks to all for your timely replies. :)
Okay, if I've got to use 5.5 or 6.0 until I can find memory, that's what
I'll have to do. :) Can anyone provide me with a media set that I can
install with? I'm pretty sure my CDROM here will do 512-byte sectors...
Thanks!
Chris
"Fred N. van Kempen" <waltje(a)pdp11.nl>
Sent by: cctech-admin(a)classiccmp.org
08/10/2003 01:34 PM
Please respond to cctech
To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org, Christopher Cureau <chrisc(a)addpower.com>
cc:
Subject: Re: MicroVAX 3100 questions
Chris,
Late reply... was kinda busy.
I've become the new owner of a nice MicroVAX 3100,
and I'm trying to
learn
more about it. I had a few hardware-related
questions, and I'm hoping
that
someone here can give me some insight.
Yay! The
3100, albeit a bit slowish, are nice boxes... they're a real
VAX, they use SCSI for I/O (read: cheapo drives and stuff) and, as long
as they're taken care of, virtually indestructible. I have about 30 of
them :)
This is what I know about the system so far --
it's got three RZ26
drives
in it, although one appears to have died, since SHOW
DEV only reports
two
installed. If I were to replace the failed one, do I
need to get my
hands
on another Digital drive, or will any SCSI drive work
with VMS? Also,
I've
heard that some vaxes (or was it VMS, or both?) have
limits on the size
of
the drive it will work with...what would work best in
this system?
The 3100 will not be able to boot off drives larger than 4GB, because
of
how their ROMs address the sectors. Once booted, the OS takes over, and
they have no real limits. So.. make sure the OS boot area "lives" below
that size, and you're fine. Very old ROMs have a 1GB limit, but rather
than going with those, just swap the ROMs :)
Also, DEC drives are good, but any good SCSI drive will do. Many people,
me included, use Seagate HAWK drives (2GB, 3.5", 1" low-power), which now
come dirt-cheap.
My VAX came with VMS 5.5-2 installed, but I'd like
to go ahead and get
the
hobbyist license and move to 7.2. Will my little VAX
handle it? It's
got
16 megs of memory and about 2 gigs of hard disk space
(unless I can coax
that other RZ26 into working...)
16MB is pushing the limits for 7.x. I believe it
*does* run, but it will
be slow as hell, and probably slower than that :) Try to stick to 5.5 or
6.x, or find more memory. The machines has a 32MB limit, by the way.
Also, I don't have a CDROM, or a place to put it
in the case. Again, if
I get an external SCSI case, does it or the CDROM I put in it need to be
specific to the VAX?
External cases work find (it IS just regular SCSI...) but
there's a catch.
For reasons unknown to me, DEC decided to fit these machines with their
own weird "external SCSI" connector. Meaning, you need a very special
cable (BC36 I believe) converting from their connector to the regular
Centronics-like connector. If you have or can get that, no problems.
Otherwise, either mount the CDROM drive inside the chassis, or fix your
own "external" cable using a soldering iron and some patience.
The VAX is like most systems of its class: it requires a CDROM drive
able to handle 512-byte sectors. That obviously includes the DEC
drives, but also those from Sun, SGI, IBM and a truckload of modern
drives (Toshiba, Plextor) and, for some reason, many CD-R and CD-RW
drives.
Thanks in advance for your help! I'm really
looking forward to putting
this machine back into service...
Yeah!
Cheers,
Fred (just done with fixing up the old DEC laptop ;-)