Hi, here is the next movement: After I found out that the ULTRIX 4.5 tape's standalone kernel doesn't support the 6400, even though ULTRIX 4.5 says it supports the 6400 and 6500, (duh!) I had to help myself. Fortunately there is SIMH/VAX and with that I could install ULTRIX 4.5 (manually, the scripts didn't work). Now I have the image of an RA90 drive with a proven bootable kernel and the basic distribution that will allow me to do everything else from there, once that is up. This is what I did to transfer that image to an RA90: 1) net-boot uVAX-II with NetBSD from my FreeBSD laptop :-) 2) write the gzip-ed image ra90.bin.gz to a TK50 tape # dd if=ra90.bin.gz of=/dev/rmt0 ibs=1024000 obs=512 3) boot VAX6400 with VMS 4) on VMS transfer the gzip-ed file to a VMS disk file $ MOUNT/FOREIGN/BLOCK=512/RECORD=512 MUC6: $ COPY MUC6: RA90_BIN.GZ 5) mount an RA90 disk forreign $ MOUNT/FOREIGN DUA1: 6) unzip and transfer to that disk $ GZIP :== $SYS$ROOT:[GUNTHER]GZIP.EXE $ DEFINE/USER SYS$OUTPUT DUA1: $ GZIP -d -c RA90_BIN.GZ the hope is that the above would emulate what on UNIX would have been: # gzip -d -c ra90.bin.gz |dd of=/dev/rra1c bs=512 7) that takes forever. After an hour or so, I stopped the process, because I figured I didn't have to write all those trailing zero-bytes to the disk. 8) cheked if anything reasonable had been written to the disk $ TYPE DUA1: and indeed, garbage shows up that looks like it is the first blocks of that image. 8) reboot VAX6400 when it comes to loading system software, it immediately HALTs after accessing the disk for a moment. Sounds to me as if it didn't quite get a proper executable master boot block. The question to all VMS gurus is then: did I do anything wrong with the mount/foreign dua1, what is the blocking used? Since I cannot specify /block and /record for disks, I assume that the block is one sector. Does VMS write to the sectors in a different ordering? Does a mount/foreign spare the master boot blocks and begin writing with an offset of a few sectors? Thanks, -Gunther PS: I guess if noone can give me a hunch on how to do this simple thing with VMS, I will just have to wait until I get my KDA50 boards to use with my uVAX-II so that I can write the disk using NetBSD. Ah the fun of interfacing! -- Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow(a)regenstrief.org Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org