On Sunday 30 September 2007 06:03, Arno Kletzander wrote:
(Hah...Just in time to join in when vax-ownership is
asked!)
Hello folks,
my very first DEC computer has arrived - a VAXstation II/GPX in a
BA123 enclosure from Jos Dreesen, which I just brought home from
Switzerland last weekend with the help of my parents. Thanks again!
Congrats.
As to mass storage, there is a RX33 floppy drive in
the vertical bay
and the system has one HDD frontpanel insert installed. It came with
a dead (possibly revivable) RD53, but a fellow collector also gave me
a supposedly functional one.
As others will tell you, dead RD53s are a common occurrence.
I assume the backplane is the original 4x Q/CD, 8x Q/Q
thing that
belongs in a BA123 as indicated by the lettering in the cardcage. To
my understanding, this means the grant chain was broken in slot 5
(after the RQDX3) because there's no board in its CD half. I
rearranged the cards so that the RQDX3 now resides in 4AB, the QDSS
base board is in 5AD and the DELQA in 8CD (I hope I did get that
serpentine configuration right).
I think this sounds correct.
After correcting an issue with the cardcage fan (which
turned out to
be just the connector inside the fan tray plugged in backwards!), I
hooked up a crufty old laptop as a terminal but didn't get any output
as the selftest always got stuck at "A", which corresponds to a
keyboard/pointing device problem. This is supposedly normal since I
have the VCB02 video option installed but nothing plugged into it. (I
have yet to get myself a DEC keyboard, mouse and the BC18Z splitter
box cable; at the same time, I'll be looking for a TK drive with
controller and any other stuff I can cram in there.)
You can always pull out the VCB cardset...
I can get into console I/O mode (chevron prompt) by
sending a Break
from the terminal but it's a bit annoying that I don't get to see the
CPU version banner and the test countdown that way. Shorting pins 8
and 9 on the serial console connector didn't make any difference
either (I have read it will cause some VAXstations to use that as
console instead of the graphics display) - bit of a bummer
considering that any humble SPARCstation who realizes they haven't
got a keyboard attached will start using the serial console.
I think that you may need to pull the VCB to get it to use the serial
port as the console.
I have read the KA630 User's Guide, especially the
meaning of the BBU
RAM contents, and it doesn't look as if there is anything short of
hacking the POST code and burning a new PROM that could be done about
it, but if I have overlooked something, I'm all ears. Other than
that, I'm off now looking for a MOP server and some netbootable OS
image, perhaps NetBSD, for a start...
Pat
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