Sorry Ben, I lost your original email, but going from this: On Thursday, November 04, 1999 12:23 AM, Benjamin Gardiner wrote: [snip] This is goodness, often you will need several to get one. All of my VAXen live for the One and die for the One :-) Which is a not so clever way of saying that it is not uncommon to have one machine that is fully restored and one or more donor machines supporting it. For historical machines I'd be inclined to keep them original but others differ on that opinion as well. It sounds like you want something to play with. One of the nicest uVAX II cases was the BA123. These cases are really neat but prone to damage easily. I'm still trying to find a replacement door panel for mine. So empty card cages can be valuable! Plus the ultimate donation is a replacement power supply (PSU). This we can help with, I've done it on several machines now. There are several steps to go through though. 1) You have to determine what "kind" of box your VAXen are in. The two I'm most familar with are the BA23 and the BA123. BA23 - Is 19" wide and 5" tall when rack mounted and it is about 7" wide and 19" tall when it is in its floor pedestal configuration. It is fairly easily lifted. It has space inside for 1 drive + tape. BA123 - (aka "World Box") is about 15" wide and 22" high, usually has wheels on the bottom and is damn difficult to lift. It has space inside for four drives + tape. 2) The minimum system to netboot NetBSD (reccomended as the first step) is : CPU + 8MB RAM Ethernet The backplane consists of rows of four connectors each, each row constitutes a "slot" in my mind but in fact some rows are two slots each. The BA23 has three "special" slots where all four connectors are used and the BA123 has four special slots. These are where the CPU and memory go although you can put "dual wide" cards in them if you stick to the top two connectors. They are known as Q/CD slots because the first two connectors are Q-bus and the second two are available for boards to use. Then after the special slots the backplane is Q/Q meaning that two dual wide Q bus cards go into those slots side by side. Q bus does not tolerate "empty" slots so you need to have all Q slots from the CPU to the last card in the system be filled. Here is a typical layout: +--- M7606 (CPU) ------------------------+ +--- M7608 (memory) ---------------------+ +--- M7608 (memory) ---------------------+ +--- M7516 (net)----+ EMPTY on BA123 + +--- M7546 (tk50)---+----M9047 (grant)---+ +--- M7555 (RQDx3)--+ EMPTY + + EMPTY + EMPTY + + ... + + +-------------------+--------------------+ Connections go to the CPU (Console port, selector port) Top connectors across the CPU and memory cards Ethernet connector to the 7516 TK50 connected to the 7546 Cable from the RQDx3 to the breakout board for the drives. --Chuck