On Mon, 22 Jun 1998, Seth J. Morabito wrote:
Saturday at
the local swapmeet, I picked up a MicroVAX 2000.
Aaah, MicroVAX! One of my favorite computers :) Congratulations!
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The MicroVAX and VAXstation 2000's take MFM
harddrives, usually the DEC
RD-series (RD52, RD53, RD54). If you can get your hands on an RD54,
that's what you'll want -- around 170MB, plenty of room for a
"full-ish"
Sounds like a Maxtor 2190 clone.
VMS 5.5-2 installation. I really don't know about
the resistor board,
though -- I'm afraid I've never seen one.
Back to that SCSI -- the SCSI in the MicroVAX 2000 was for use only
with the TK50Z-FA tape drive, a 95MB cartridge tape system which looks
almost exactly like today's fancy DLT tapes (It's DLT's grandfather,
pretty much). TK50 is an extremely common format for older (early to
mid-80's) DEC software distributions. The firmware in the MicroVAX
makes it impossible to boot off of any SCSI device besides the TK50,
unfortunately.
Is that the 4" square (about) tape cartridge that i see a lot of
occasionally?
It sounds like you don't have the external
connector option that had
a 50-pin Centronics (for the TK50) and a 50-pin D-sub connector for
external MFM drives. That means you can pretty much safely ignore the
NCR53C80, unfortunately :)
No, but there are a 50-pin and a 60-pin header on the motherboard that
are not presently used.
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You didn't mention another connector, but I
believe there has to be
either a BNC connector (for thinnet) or a 15-pin Thicknet connector on
the back of the system, toward the upper right. Look for a connector
that has a hash-mark (#) next to it. This is your 10mbps ethernet.
(Lance ethernet, I think?)
The BNC is there, I just flat forgot to mention it.
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a disk, your options are pretty limited right now:
You can run it as
a diskless machine in a VMS VAXcluster, or you can netboot NetBSD from
another system. I've been doing that with mine for a while, and it
works fairly well, though it's tricky to set up. See:
The VMS VAXcluster is not an option, but the netboot may be.
Thanks! I will probably need it. My only other DEC experience is with
the Rainbow :)
- don