Setting up a VAXstation - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

2 Oct 2007

On 10/2/07, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
...

 At 4:54 PM +0100 9/30/07, Jules Richardson wrote:
 Jason T wrote:
 My 3100/30 boots fine off the Hobbyist VMS disc
using my
boots-anything Apple CD300 (aka Sony) drive. 
You got there first :-) Pulls of drives from old Apple systems seem
like a good bet - I've used a few on various machines which need a
512 byte block size. I normally use an Apple CD600, but it isn't
quite perfect - some SGI systems don't like it for some reason
(others do, as does everything non-SGI I've hooked it up to) 
 I've had very good luck with an external Panasonic 4x CD-ROM drive I
 purchased new in '95 for my PowerBook 520c.  It has worked on
 everything I've connected it to.  I've used it on both a Mac and PC
 laptop, and on numerous DEC, SUN, and Amiga systems.  My only SGI
 systems have built in CD-ROM's.  Another likely source would be old
 Sun Hardware.

Maybe I've just been really lucky, but I've been using a Toshiba 40x SCSI
cdrom in Sony external case to boot Suns, SGIs, and Macs for quite some
time. It also works great on my Amigas and PCs. I read all this about using
old drives, but then just gave the Toshiba a shot, and it's worked ever
since. As a bonus, being a (somewhat, maybe 5 or 6 years old) recent drive,
it reads CD-R copies of discs so I can leave the originals in safekeeping.

Guess I just lucked out and it supports 512-byte blocks?

Mike