vax, cdroms, etc - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

9 Mar 1999

On Mar 9, 22:34, Jim Strickland wrote:

...
  > >3.  can someone answer conclusively for me
whether the vaxstation expects
...
  > >    the disk to have parity enabled?  The
lists I've read don't seem very
...
  > >    sure.
 >
 > Not quite sure what you mean here.  It expects 512k blocks, if you want to
...
  > boot off the install CD. 
That means that only a few CD-ROM drives will be bootable, such as Toshiba
3301, 3401, and a few old Sony drives -- and all of those will need to be
set up correctly.  On the Toshibas, that means a minor internal
modification, unless you get one that was previously used on a Vax,
Sparcstation, or SGI.

...
  > However, I believe it will read CD's in
standard
 > drives once the system is up and running. 
Which suggests it knows to issue a SCSI command to set the blocksize after
booting, which almost all SCSI-2 CD-ROMs obey.

...
  I should clarify.  Does it expect its internal hard
disks to have parity turned
...
  on or not? 
I don't know for a Vax or VMS, but it shouldn't do any harm to disable it
on most devices.  Most devices always generate the parity, and the setting
only determines whether they check it on input.

-- 

Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York