IBM AS400 questions

[devin davison]

Thanks for the info. I was worried that I needed special disks, these ones
are holding up for now.
my machine has a drive for 4/8gb tapes. I have never seen such a drive on a
machine till this one. I am used to DDS DLT and LTO tapes.

Unfortunately, what i thought was a nice new 4gb ibm branded tape sealed in
box turned out to be some kind of test tape. So that is no good for
backups. I bought a bunch of other sony tapes, but they are only 525mb.
Will those work in my drive as well?

As a last resort, i see a scsi connector on the back of the machine, can i
connect any old DDS or DLT tape drive, or do i need a specific drive meant
speciffically for the as400, like the hard drives?

What is the name of these tape cartriges, what should i look for so i can
but them online. Ive tried ebay / amazon with the term "QIC 4/8gb tape"
with few results aside from the drives.

--Devin

On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Paul Berger <phb.hfx at gmail.com> wrote:

> Devin,
>
> The backup command is 'savsys'.  The commands on on AS/400 are usually
> three letter abbreviations for in the command mashed together savsys =
> 'save system'  or 'work with user profiles' is 'WRKUSRPRF'  and the
> shutdown command 'Power Down System' is 'PWRDWNSYS'.  If you type in the
> command and press PF4 it will open a menu where you can fill in the options
> for the command, once you get used to the commands you can type the
> commands with options right on the command line  for instance the command
> to shutdown and power off is 'pwrdwnsys *immed restart(*no)' this is
> permanently burned into my brain from back in the days when AS/400 was
> still in development and the OS was running on S/38, but was a bit shaky
> and prompting commands would crash the system so we learned the commands
> with options.
>
> Since this is a 170 it probably has a QIC or 8mm tape under the covers and
> the resource name for it is likely 'TAP01' savsys will by default create a
> bootable tape that can be used to restore the OS.  You may want to test
> booting from the tape you created by changing the IPL tpye on the operator
> panel from the usual "B" to "D".  The D mode IPL specifies booting from an
> alternate IPL device which is normall tape or CDROM.  You may not be aware
> that you cannot just throw in any SCSI disk, the disks have to be the
> specific disks that are blessed for use in an AS/400.
>
> A quick google came up with a site http://www.ibmfiles.com/pages/
> as400e.htm that seems to have some of the 170 manuals linked.
>
> Paul.
>
>
>
> On 2017-04-09 1:21 PM, devin davison via cctalk wrote:
>
>> Alright, it was quite a while back that I picked up my ibm AS400 model
>> 170.
>> I had asked some questions on the list, it was locked with a password and
>> i
>> could not get into the machine. I finally got around to getting into the
>> machine and am at the main menu. Before i do anything, I want to back up
>> the machine. I have a couple of tapes.
>>
>> I am not familiar with os/400 at all, the intention is to backup the
>> machine so in the event of a hardware failure I will be able to reinstall
>> and still have a licenced install.
>>
>> I come from the sgi land, usually from the prom there is the HINV command
>> to give a nice hardware inventory of the machine, is there a similar
>> command in the ibm world? I want to find what options are installed, cpu
>> and memory details, etc.
>>
>> Any advice on what to do from here is much appreciated. I just want to get
>> the thing backed up and rest assured that if the drives fail i can
>> reinstall the os and it have its license.
>>
>> --Devin
>>
>
>