Options for resurrecting VAX 4000/400 and Vaxstation 3200

[Dr. Roland Schregle]

On Wed, 09 Mar 2016 23:22:04 +0100, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:

> The RF72 disk is a 1GB DSSI drive, and I think it's supported by the
> base /400 machine.  Once you have a working CPU, you can actually do
> some testing on this disk drive with just the VAX console firmware,
> because it's intelligent, and you can connect to it via a maintenance
> protocol and give it commands.

I've talked to it and run the diags; looks good. It is incredibly noisy  
though with its intermittent recalibration grind.
Note that the console seems to do fine with the failed B-cache... until  
you boot.

> After formatting the RD54 using the nearby VS2000, the way to get this
> one online is probably to netboot it from the SimH VMS instance
> described above.  However, is the RD54 unformatted, or just empty of
> data?  It's _in_ a VS3200, after all.

I retrofitted the RD54, the VS was originally diskless. I had to run a  
cable to the I/O bulkhead from the controller, so apparently it never had  
a disk and may have indeed netbooted from a cluster node. I have no idea  
what's on that disk, and the neither did the previous owner. BOOT  
definitely fails, and the VS3200 console seems to lack any way of testing  
it.

--GT


-- 
"END OF LINE" [MCP, 1982]
"... nowhere in the standards is it specified that 'programs that use a  
lot of memory may randomly crash at any time for no apparent reason'"  
[Stackoverflow forum, 2012]