15 Mar
2010
15 Mar
'10
8:44 p.m.
cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org wrote:
As far as I know you can't boot a traditional VAX
from a disk
of <1GB... but could I put the core of VMS on a small slow
narrow SCSI disk, like an 80MB or something, and put most of
it on the only Wide SCSI disk I have, a 10GB...?
I guess that a VS 3100-38 will happily talk to a wide disk
if you use one of those "50-pin to whatever" converters:
my VS 4K will talk to various 9GB IBM drives with 68-pin
connectors (SCSI-2) and I have had it talk to drives
with SCA connectors too.
If you can find a console ROM dated later than (iirc) April 1992
then you can forget about the ~1GB issue. Obviously if you can
find such a ROM, I'm probably not the only one who would be interested
in an image of it :-)
I was considering either attaching an external SCSI2
disk of
80-120GB, or possibly trying to fit one internally if I can
find an appropriate convertor. I have a fast/wide 8GB or 10GB
disk I could use for main storage, but I don't think I can
boot from it... Can I?
Assuming the old style ROM, you'll have issues. You can do a bunch
of fiddling but it's not easy and it will come back and bite you.
You have to format the drive for ODS-2 and allocate all the space
beyond the 1GB boundary to a disk image file (all this done, presumably
on another machine). Then install OpenVMS and use LDDRIVER to
access the rest of the disk as a logical device (LDA0:).
My VMS knowledge is /very/ rusty & I was only ever
a
sysadmin, not a developer. I've never brought up a bare
system or anything.
If you stick to a system disk < ~1.073GB (or find a newer ROM)
you'll have no problems.
Also, I have several external SCSI CD-ROMs, including
2 Apple
units. I seem to recall that VAXen want a weird block size,
same as Sun kit... is that correct? How would one tell if a
certain drive could do this or not? Is it a DIP switch
setting or just a SCSI bus command?
VAXen (and Sun boxes) want 512-byte sectors (or, rather, something
that emulates 512-byte sectors). If it boots a bootable OpenVMS
CD then it's comaptible :-)
Antonio