first step getting VAX 6000-400 booted ...

Hi, after my pretty good VAX treck last weekend (more details coming up on my project web site at a later time) I finally have SDI disks. I hooked one up last night and did all the checking as per the RA9x manual (yes I have one plus many more, will scan those at some time...) and it seems to be O.K. (even though it was pretty messed up stored in a barn among lots of birds for many years). Here is one para about where I am at and then I have some specific questions for Geoff Roberts or Ragge or anyone who has had experienced any luck with getting a 6000 up to operation. I have bootable tape for Ultrix 4.1 and VMS 5.3 both TK50. None of them work. I seem to have no luck with the TK70 and I have no way finding out what's wrong. I tried to boot from that RA90 disk, even though I don't know what's on it. It has unit #0, so I thought it might be a system disk. But that too failed with some I/O error very early in the process. I also have a TU81+ and VMS bootable tape on 9-track, maybe that's more reliable? Tonight's project is to move the TU81+ into the basement and hook it up. I'm afraid I'll get stuck there too and what then? Network booting? Here's some more detail and questions: The TK50 boot proceeds for quite a while, although it never shows any message on the console about where it is at before it halts due to some unspecified error. However, about one or two minutes into the tape running the system-panel's FAULT light comes on and at the same time both yellow and green LEDs on the TKB70 board extinguish. That's for about a second or two. Then the lights go back to normal and the fault light turned off. Another 30 seconds to a minute tape streaming and the same light-spiel happens again: fault on, TKB70 LEDs off, and back to normal. Now a shorter time (like 10 seconds) of tape streaming and again. From now on that repeats for about 4 or 5 more cycles and finally the system is halted and console says: system halted due to previous error. However, no error message is being printed. I have no idea where I am in the process. I have tried cleaning the TK70 read/write head of course. I have tried a different copy of that Ultrix tape. It's always the same. Is this bliking of fault and shutting off of both TBK70 LEDs normal for media read errors or does it indicate something more serious? How can I tell where in the process I am? Is there an error flag somewhere in memory that I could EXAMINE to find out what is wrong? BTW: at first I had my CIBCA cards in and the boot process would halt earlier: system would say "insufficient memory for CI" and "10% or more of the memory is bad". Who is checking memory there? I could not find anything in Ultrix 4.2 sources that would generate such a message. And why would it anyway, because my system check tells me that I have 512 MB of memory OK. Or does it speak of 10% of the CIBCA's internal memory? Is there a boot flag that I could turn on that would cause the loader etc. to be more verbose? Has anyone tried booting Ultrix over the network? I am going to try that but all I have is Ultrix on TK50 (that doesn't work) and sources without any VAX running to compile them on. Is there a cross compiler suite? I'd like to compile with the DEBUG flag set. Thanks for your suggestions, -Gunther -- Gunther_Schadow-------------------------------http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu Regenstrief Institute for Health Care 1050 Wishard Blvd., Indianapolis IN 46202, Phone: (317) 630 7960 schadow(a)aurora.rg.iupui.edu------------------#include <usual/disclaimer>