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

2 Oct 2007

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Subject: Re: Setting up a VAXstation
   From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com>
   Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:54:17 -0700
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"	<cctalk at
classiccmp.org>,
 General Discussion:

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.

As I've previously mentioned I'm quite fond of Plextor caddy drives 
for my PDP-11's.

If you're trying to boot an old enough version of VAX/VMS then I 
suspect 3rd party drives could cause problems.  I know the Hard 
Drives will.  I'd recommend OpenVMS 7.2 or 7.3 for greatest SCSI 
compatibility.  I simply only use DEC HD's on VAXen.  Even though I 
use 3rd party drives on my PDP-11's and Alpha's.

		Zane

I have a few Toshiba 2x SCSI drives that work well for uVAX.  The drives
are easy to spot as there is a jumper header in the ID select area.

Allison