9 Apr
2002
9 Apr
'02
11:17 a.m.
Hi everybody. This isn't strictly on topic, but I think the intent
of the question makes it close enough.
I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious
about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
Note that I do know that discs are written in 2048 byte blocks, and
the answer won't affect its performance in writing disks on these
systems. I am also aware that doing this for the long term may
needlessly shorten the life of the drive. As I said above, it is
more for curiosity, and eventually I would like to know that in case
my RRD42 dies, I have a backup. :)
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl
Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
9 Apr
9 Apr
11:37 a.m.
It's likely that if your CD-RW drive is a SCSI type, you'll be able to do what
you want. If it's an IDE type, you'll probably best forget it.
I've got no experience with CD-RW's, but LOTS of it with CD-R's, and I've
followed the development of CR-RW and DVD-R drives with considerable interest.
However, I'm not a CD-RW fan because of the media cost.
If the drive manufacturer can profide the command set and you can figure out
how to create a driver for it for the target environment, you can do what you
want. However, there's lots of learning curve. We struggled for three years
just getting a standard adopted for bootable CD's. I suspect this may get to
be even more tangled.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Smith" <csmith(a)amdocs.com>
To: "Classiccmp (E-mail)" <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 2:17 PM
Subject: Half on, half off -- New CD-R drive and 512-byte blocks
Hi everybody. This isn't strictly on topic, but I
think the intent
of the question makes it close enough.
I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious
about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
Note that I do know that discs are written in 2048 byte blocks, and
the answer won't affect its performance in writing disks on these
systems. I am also aware that doing this for the long term may
needlessly shorten the life of the drive. As I said above, it is
more for curiosity, and eventually I would like to know that in case
my RRD42 dies, I have a backup. :)
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl
Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
12:27 p.m.
I do know, from experience, that any SCSI Plextor CDROM/CD-R/CD-RW will boot
basically anything -- Sparc, SGI, RS/6000, HP,.... I've tried plextors of
varying ages (old 8plex caddy-loader up to a 12/4/32 CD-RW that's about 1 year
old) and they all work great...
Christopher Smith said:
Hi everybody. This isn't strictly on topic, but I
think the intent
of the question makes it close enough.
I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious
about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
Note that I do know that discs are written in 2048 byte blocks, and
the answer won't affect its performance in writing disks on these
systems. I am also aware that doing this for the long term may
needlessly shorten the life of the drive. As I said above, it is
more for curiosity, and eventually I would like to know that in case
my RRD42 dies, I have a backup. :)
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl
Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
- Dan Wright
(dtwright(a)uiuc.edu)
(http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright)
-] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [-
``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.''
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
2:18 p.m.
You may have the answer, here, in that IF it's a SCSI device (which it is) and
IF it's capable of behaving as a reader (which it is) then it's up to the SCSI
subsystem to move the data into the system. IF the device, in whatever mode
it "comes up" in is able to read the SCSI CD, then it should be no different
than any other CD drive, irrespective of the ability to write the device.
I guess it all comes down to the state in which the system finds itself when
it's trying to read the SCSI channel for boot.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Wright" <dtwright(a)uiuc.edu>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 3:27 PM
Subject: Re: Half on, half off -- New CD-R drive and 512-byte blocks
I do know, from experience, that any SCSI Plextor
CDROM/CD-R/CD-RW will boot
basically anything -- Sparc, SGI, RS/6000, HP,.... I've tried plextors of
varying ages (old 8plex caddy-loader up to a 12/4/32 CD-RW that's about 1
year
old) and they all work great...
Christopher Smith said:
Hi everybody. This isn't strictly on topic,
but I think the intent
of the question makes it close enough.
I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious
about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
Note that I do know that discs are written in 2048 byte blocks, and
the answer won't affect its performance in writing disks on these
systems. I am also aware that doing this for the long term may
needlessly shorten the life of the drive. As I said above, it is
more for curiosity, and eventually I would like to know that in case
my RRD42 dies, I have a backup. :)
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl
Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
- Dan Wright
(dtwright(a)uiuc.edu)
(http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright)
-] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [-
``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.''
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
10 Apr
10 Apr
4:54 p.m.
On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:27:50PM -0500, Dan Wright wrote:
I do know, from experience, that any SCSI Plextor
CDROM/CD-R/CD-RW will boot
basically anything -- Sparc, SGI, RS/6000, HP,.... I've tried plextors of
varying ages (old 8plex caddy-loader up to a 12/4/32 CD-RW that's about 1 year
old) and they all work great...
In this case, I've got bad news or you. You might be out of luck trying
this with a VAXstation 3100. My VAXstation 3100 started to boot the VMS 7.1
install CD, but barfed halfway through loading the kernel. I was not
happy with either the 4x, the 8x or the 12 SCSI Plextor, nor with the
Toshiba drive (all set to 512 byte/sector). Ripping a DEC RRD42 out of
one of my DECstations finally did the trick. Seems like this machines
are rather ... touchy about what they boot from.
Regards,
Alex.
--
We're gonna be body guards for teen rock-stars. Wouldn't the cause of freedom
be better served if we killed them instead?
-- Schlock from the ''Schlock Mercenary'' comic
strip
9 Apr
9 Apr
1:07 p.m.
On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Christopher Smith wrote:
I just bought a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s --
and am curious
about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
Haven't tried my CD-RW on a non-Intel box as boot device, but I know
that the 512-byte boot block is not the only issue. For instance, I
have a Sony 8x reader with an IBM "microcode upgrade" that will boot my
SparcStation, every RS6k I own, and my Alphas, ***unless*** it's a
VMS/OpenVMS CD. The BabyVAXen also won't boot off it. The Indy won't.
OTOH, My Plextor 32x, May It Rest In Peace (I dropped it!), would boot
all the above except VMS CDs.
I know that early RS/6000s did some sense checking that narrowed the
field considerably. I _guess_ that VMS does the same. About the rest,
I'm clueless.
Back to reading 512-byte blocks, both my old TEAC 55R and my new
Yamaha SCSI CDRW have a jumper to allow 512-byte reads, as do most of
the better SCSI readers.
Doc
3:41 p.m.
On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Doc wrote:
I don't need to boot off it, but I would like to use my Yamaha CRW2200S
16-10-40X CD-R/W in my RS/6000 397, but I can't get the SCSI to recognize
the drive. I have no idea why. The drive is at ID5. The main CD-ROM in
the machine is at ID6 and is a 20X Wide Plextor, which works just fine. I
have termination disabled on all devices, and I have a wide terminator on
the end of the cable.
Peace... Sridhar
I just bought
a new CD-RW drive -- a Sony CRX145s -- and am curious
about whether it may read the 512-byte blocks necessary for using it
as a backup boot device on my VAXen, Sparc, SGI, etc.
Does anyone know whether this, or just for information, some other
CD-RW unit, will do such a thing?
Haven't tried my CD-RW on a non-Intel box as boot device, but I know
that the 512-byte boot block is not the only issue. For instance, I
have a Sony 8x reader with an IBM "microcode upgrade" that will boot my
SparcStation, every RS6k I own, and my Alphas, ***unless*** it's a
VMS/OpenVMS CD. The BabyVAXen also won't boot off it. The Indy won't.
OTOH, My Plextor 32x, May It Rest In Peace (I dropped it!), would boot
all the above except VMS CDs.
I know that early RS/6000s did some sense checking that narrowed the
field considerably. I _guess_ that VMS does the same. About the rest,
I'm clueless.
4:02 p.m.
On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
I don't need to boot off it, but I would like to
use my Yamaha CRW2200S
16-10-40X CD-R/W in my RS/6000 397, but I can't get the SCSI to recognize
the drive. I have no idea why. The drive is at ID5. The main CD-ROM in
the machine is at ID6 and is a 20X Wide Plextor, which works just fine. I
have termination disabled on all devices, and I have a wide terminator on
the end of the cable.
I'm willing to be wrong, but I doubt that a 3xx-series (or 5xx or 9xx)
will see any CD device that's not either Plextor or blessed by IBM, as
evidenced by IBM badge.
You might look at the comp.unix.aix archives for more details.
Doc
4:05 p.m.
On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Doc Shipley wrote:
*sigh* So I have to save my money and get a PleXWriter.
Peace... Sridhar
I don't
need to boot off it, but I would like to use my Yamaha CRW2200S
16-10-40X CD-R/W in my RS/6000 397, but I can't get the SCSI to recognize
the drive. I have no idea why. The drive is at ID5. The main CD-ROM in
the machine is at ID6 and is a 20X Wide Plextor, which works just fine. I
have termination disabled on all devices, and I have a wide terminator on
the end of the cable.
I'm willing to be wrong, but I doubt that a 3xx-series (or 5xx or 9xx)
will see any CD device that's not either Plextor or blessed by IBM, as
evidenced by IBM badge.
You might look at the comp.unix.aix archives for more details.
4:33 p.m.
On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Doc Shipley wrote:
Everybody should own a PlexWriter anyhow. ;)
Seriously, though, considering the price of a SCSI Plexwriter, it'll
be worth a post to comp.unix.aix to make sure that that's what it
takes, and that a Plextor will work, for that matter.
Doc
I'm willing to be wrong, but I doubt that a
3xx-series (or 5xx or 9xx)
will see any CD device that's not either Plextor or blessed by IBM, as
evidenced by IBM badge.
You might look at the comp.unix.aix archives for more details.
*sigh* So I have to save my money and get a PleXWriter. 
5:59 p.m.
Doc wrote:
Haven't tried my CD-RW on a non-Intel box as
boot device, but I know
that the 512-byte boot block is not the only issue. For instance, I
have a Sony 8x reader with an IBM "microcode upgrade" that will boot my
SparcStation, every RS6k I own, and my Alphas, ***unless*** it's a
VMS/OpenVMS CD. The BabyVAXen also won't boot off it. The Indy won't.
OTOH, My Plextor 32x, May It Rest In Peace (I dropped it!), would boot
all the above except VMS CDs.
I know that early RS/6000s did some sense checking that narrowed the
field considerably. I _guess_ that VMS does the same. About the rest,
I'm clueless.
Back to reading 512-byte blocks, both my old TEAC 55R and my new
Yamaha SCSI CDRW have a jumper to allow 512-byte reads, as do most of
the better SCSI readers.
Jerome Fine replies:
I have a VERY old SCSI CDROM drive which seems to be able to
recognize 512 byte blocks, although I have not made a final test. It
does not recognize a CD-RW media, but I have tested it with a CD-R
that I used when I made a copy of my backup files for the complete
system.
I am using Windows 98 (which I dislike), but the Ersatz-11 emulator
runs very well under Windows 98, so I don't have a choice if I want
to run my PDP-11 programs under this emulator.
By the end of the month, I will make a copy of a bootable set of files
on a CD-R and test the SCSI CDROM drive to see if it will boot RT-11.
I do have one question for a problem I don't have a solution for. Tim
Shoppa made an RT-11 Freeware CD with files under the ISO file
structure at the beginning of the CD and other files under the RT-11
files structure at the end of the CD. Somehow (probably on a VAX
or an Alpha under VMS), he was able to master a CD with both
file structures. The essence is that there are 114,688 sectors (of 2048
bytes each or 7 RT-11 partitions of 33,554,432 bytes each) starting
at sector 212,992 (which is 13 * 16,384 sectors from the start) on
the CD.
Does anyone know of a program which will work under Windows 98
that can copy a file from the hard disk to the CD starting at a specified
sector on the CD rather than sector zero on the CD?
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
--
If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail
address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk
e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be
obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the
'at' with the four digits of the current year.
10 Apr
10 Apr
2:13 p.m.
Doc wrote:
Haven't tried my CD-RW on a non-Intel box as
boot device, but I know
that the 512-byte boot block is not the only issue. For instance, I
have a Sony 8x reader with an IBM "microcode upgrade" that will boot my
SparcStation, every RS6k I own, and my Alphas, ***unless*** it's a
VMS/OpenVMS CD. The BabyVAXen also won't boot off it. The Indy won't.
OTOH, My Plextor 32x, May It Rest In Peace (I dropped it!), would boot
all the above except VMS CDs.
I know that early RS/6000s did some sense checking that narrowed the
field considerably. I _guess_ that VMS does the same. About the rest,
I'm clueless.
Back to reading 512-byte blocks, both my old TEAC 55R and my new
Yamaha SCSI CDRW have a jumper to allow 512-byte reads, as do most of
the better SCSI readers.
Jerome Fine replies:
I have a VERY old SCSI CDROM drive which seems to be able to
recognize 512 byte blocks, although I have not made a final test. It
does not recognize a CD-RW media, but I have tested it with a CD-R
that I used when I made a copy of my backup files for the complete
system.
I am using Windows 98 (which I dislike), but the Ersatz-11 emulator
runs very well under Windows 98, so I don't have a choice if I want
to run my PDP-11 programs under this emulator.
By the end of the month, I will make a copy of a bootable set of files
on a CD-R and test the SCSI CDROM drive to see if it will boot RT-11.
I do have one question for a problem I don't have a solution for. Tim
Shoppa made an RT-11 Freeware CD with files under the ISO file
structure at the beginning of the CD and other files under the RT-11
files structure at the end of the CD. Somehow (probably on a VAX
or an Alpha under VMS), he was able to master a CD with both
file structures. The essence is that there are 114,688 sectors (of
standard 2048 bytes each) of data starting at sector 212,992 (an
exact multiple of 16,384 - in this case 13 * 16,384). The 114,688
sectors hold 7 RT-11 partitions (where each partition is 16,384
sectors or 33,554,432 bytes). Under Ersatz-11, I can:
MOUNT DU1: CDROMI: (where I: is the Windows 98 drive letter)
then under RT-11, I can
SET DU1: UNIT=1,PART=13
SET DU2: UNIT=1,PART=14
....
SET DU7: UNIT=1,PART=19
At this point under RT-11, all 7 RT-11 partitions can be accessed
as DU1:, DU2:, ....., DU7:
It seems as though we have a similar requirement, although
I am already able to solve your problem. Under "Nero Burning",
the "Burn Image" option does exactly what you wish - you can
write a file on the hard disk drive to the CD-R or CD-RW
starting at sector ZERO on the CD media - IF the CD is
empty.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
--
If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail
address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk
e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be
obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the
'at' with the four digits of the current year.
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11 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
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als＠thangorodrim.de -
csmith＠amdocs.com -
doc＠mdrconsult.com -
dtwright＠uiuc.edu -
edick＠idcomm.com -
jhfinepw4z＠compsys.to -
vance＠ikickass.org