On 6/1/07, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote: I concur. Sure. Perhaps. I think I've gone the other way (hung a TU80 off of a 3rd party Qbus tape controller like a TC131), so I don't _think_ there's anything strange. Unfortunately, I don't think you'll see too much in the way of bootable 9-track tapes for the VAX. PDP-11s of the right era routinely installed from a bootable magtape, but not VAXen. Instead, they have some console medium (11/780 == RX01, 11/750 and 11/730 == TU58, VAX8600 == RL02, VAX 8200 == RX50...) The 11/750 is a bit off for the oldest types of VAXen in that it doesn't have a dedicated boot processor, but in other ways, it's typical of the 11/7xx line. There's a switch on the front of your VAX with positions from A-D. Each position corresponds to a bipolar PROM socket on one of the CPU boards. Typically, your preferred boot ROM goes into A, and the one for TU58 goes into D. We had a DR boot (for our SI9900), a DU boot (UDA50) and a DD(?) boot for TU58. I don't recall there being a TS or TM boot for the 11/750, but you could dig around. I suppose you could enter any random bootstrap into Console ODT, but we never did that. The usual technique for booting a blank 11/750 with some OS was to start with the install kit, a stack of TU58s and magtapes. You boot the first TU58, then follow the directions to insert the remaining ones as required, to get into some standalone restore utility. At some point, it's all loaded, then activity turns to siphoning whatever tape drive onto whatever disk drive, then rebooting the disk to complete the install. The software is all different, but the technique was the same for Ultrix or VMS, back in the day. It's entirely possible that BSD has a different technique, but since we never had a boot ROM for tape drives, I don't think that's how we installed 4.0BSD when we were running it on our 11/750 (I personally only ever installed VMS and Ultrix). If you can't get a stack of TU58s with the right restore application on them, your next best bet is likely to be some flavor of TU58 emulator and images files from a modern machine. I don't think there's an easy way away from that except to pre-load a disk image external to the 11/750 then boot the 11/750 "in the middle" of the established install procedure. -ethan