At 12:46 PM 7/05/2003 +0930, Geoff Roberts wrote: It's been a while since I worked on 6000 series VAXen (it's about 4 years since I left La Trobe Uni). My immediate recollection is that the upgrade requires new CPUs and new memory as well - although it might be that the memory I had was too small/old to work in the 6000-300 that became a 6000-500. I do recall it was just a matter of pulling the old stuff out and adding the new stuff in. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

The specific manual you want is: EK-650EB-UP-002 VAX 6000 XMI Conversion Manual which is online according to http://vt100.net/manx If that turns out to be wrong (i.e. not online) let me know and I'll dig out my copy and send it along. I can provide pointers to the unclear bits, but you'll definitely want the manual - it will speed things up immensely. There are (at least) two ways of converting from pre-6500 to 6500/6600. One involves the full upgrade that swaps PSU blocks and so on. The other (which seems to be what you have) is to add a T2019 to provide an additional voltage on previously unused XMI connections. This latter route does not (AFAICR) involve replacing the backplane. The manual lists which options don't mind the extra voltage and which probably would prefer to live in a different cabinet - you're safer reading the details in the manual than relying on my memory at this point! I think that you just add the T2019, swap in KA66A and MS65A, remove the modules that won't work in the new config (nothing significant IIRC, probably the older style CPUs) and off you go. There may be a restriction on the number of I/O modules you can use if you have a T2019 and obviously you lose an XMI slot! The KA66 supports large amounts of physical memory, possibly up to 3.5GB. If you choose to do this, something else needs to be changed to work properly (just SW, no HW smokes IIRC). It's probably the XMI-BI adapter that needs to be upgraded to the + version. If you don't do this, the OS refuses to use the extra memory. I'm reasonably sure the KA65 could also do this (although for smaller amounts of memory, probably 1GB). I'm reasonably sure that this was never supported in the field. If you happen to have one, the VAX 9000 was also capable of going beyond 512MB, but again it may never have been supported (in fact, the entire system should probably never have been built :-)). Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org