9 Apr
2017
9 Apr
'17
8:33 p.m.
Thanks for the info. I was worried that I needed special disks, these ones
are holding up for now.
my machine has a drive for 4/8gb tapes. I have never seen such a drive on a
machine till this one. I am used to DDS DLT and LTO tapes.
Unfortunately, what i thought was a nice new 4gb ibm branded tape sealed in
box turned out to be some kind of test tape. So that is no good for
backups. I bought a bunch of other sony tapes, but they are only 525mb.
Will those work in my drive as well?
As a last resort, i see a scsi connector on the back of the machine, can i
connect any old DDS or DLT tape drive, or do i need a specific drive meant
speciffically for the as400, like the hard drives?
What is the name of these tape cartriges, what should i look for so i can
but them online. Ive tried ebay / amazon with the term "QIC 4/8gb tape"
with few results aside from the drives.
--Devin
On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Paul Berger <phb.hfx at gmail.com> wrote:
Devin,
The backup command is 'savsys'. The commands on on AS/400 are usually
three letter abbreviations for in the command mashed together savsys =
'save system' or 'work with user profiles' is 'WRKUSRPRF' and
the
shutdown command 'Power Down System' is 'PWRDWNSYS'. If you type in the
command and press PF4 it will open a menu where you can fill in the options
for the command, once you get used to the commands you can type the
commands with options right on the command line for instance the command
to shutdown and power off is 'pwrdwnsys *immed restart(*no)' this is
permanently burned into my brain from back in the days when AS/400 was
still in development and the OS was running on S/38, but was a bit shaky
and prompting commands would crash the system so we learned the commands
with options.
Since this is a 170 it probably has a QIC or 8mm tape under the covers and
the resource name for it is likely 'TAP01' savsys will by default create a
bootable tape that can be used to restore the OS. You may want to test
booting from the tape you created by changing the IPL tpye on the operator
panel from the usual "B" to "D". The D mode IPL specifies booting
from an
alternate IPL device which is normall tape or CDROM. You may not be aware
that you cannot just throw in any SCSI disk, the disks have to be the
specific disks that are blessed for use in an AS/400.
A quick google came up with a site http://www.ibmfiles.com/pages/
as400e.htm that seems to have some of the 170 manuals linked.
Paul.
On 2017-04-09 1:21 PM, devin davison via cctalk wrote:
Alright, it was quite a while back that I picked
up my ibm AS400 model
170.
I had asked some questions on the list, it was locked with a password and
i
could not get into the machine. I finally got around to getting into the
machine and am at the main menu. Before i do anything, I want to back up
the machine. I have a couple of tapes.
I am not familiar with os/400 at all, the intention is to backup the
machine so in the event of a hardware failure I will be able to reinstall
and still have a licenced install.
I come from the sgi land, usually from the prom there is the HINV command
to give a nice hardware inventory of the machine, is there a similar
command in the ibm world? I want to find what options are installed, cpu
and memory details, etc.
Any advice on what to do from here is much appreciated. I just want to get
the thing backed up and rest assured that if the drives fail i can
reinstall the os and it have its license.
--Devin