680x0's, Towers, & Serendipity - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

8 Jun 1998

...
 > I haven't looked at that NG for awhile.  The
400 series towers were 
> under the distinct diadvantage that there was no (official) support 
> for TCP/IP. 
I was lucky enough to get an ethernet board with my '700 - I've run up
XDM on the 700 before and then connected to it from an old '486 PC
running Linux just for the hell of it. :) 
...

 > [ OS tapes ]
> You know, I had the address of a vendor that could get you those; 
> unfortunately, though, they wanted an arm and a leg for it >:-P.   
well you could get them through NCR when I last looked (about three
years ago now), but they wanted something like 800 dollars US for them,
which seemed a little on the expensive side for a ten year old machine
that wasn't ever going to be used for anything profitable!! :)

...
 > I got the tapes for my machine, but NCR states
vehemently that they 
> *cannot* be copied.  I don't believe this, of course (how did they 
> write the tape in the 1st place?), but I dont' know how you would 
> copy them. 
I'd agree with you there - surely a raw copy of the tape would work.
Maybe there was code in the OS to prevent you from reading raw from an
OS tape or something, but I'd assume that it could just be copied on
another Unix machine.
...

> The tower actually *boots* from the tape during install!  Is that 
> crazy or what? 
...
 from what I've seen a lot of Unix machines will do
this for diagnostic / install purposes. It's one of those things that reminds me
how much I
hate modern PCs... 

Think the best I can do with my 700 is hook the disks up under Linux or
something (they're SCSI on the 700, not MFM) and do a raw dump on the
disk. In theory I suppose I could then find an identical drive from
somewhere and restore the system...
(Has anyone ever tried this!?)

cheers

Jules
...

Jeff

  mind you, last time I tried to power up the
machine it was completely
 dead. I only had a few minutes so checked obvious fuses etc, but without
 any luck. Hopefully something simple - I don't fancy trying to trace a
 fault on one of those system boards :*)

 cheers

 Jules