IBM RS/6000 Model 320 (7012-320) and AIX 3.2.5

[Chris Hanson]

I have an IBM RS/6000 POWERstation 320 (original 7012-320) with plenty of RAM and SCSI storage. I’d like to install AIX 3.2.5 on it.

Here’s the hardware setup:

- POWERstation 320
  - 8MB RAM currently, soon to be 72MB
- Serial port adapter so I can use a terminal
- Correct IBM keyboard (not working at the moment, hence the terminal)
- Correct IBM mouse
- MCA Color Display Adapter (1-1)
- MCA Ethernet Adapter (2-1)
- MCA SCSI-1 Adapter (4-1)
- AIX 3.2.0 floppy images, including boot floppy images
- AIX 3.2.5 CD-ROM images
- External SCSI DAT (DDS-1) and CD-ROM drives

The CD images appear to be ISO-9660 format, containing piles of “AIX backup/restore format file” archives; the floppy images are also identified as being that format (no filesystems, just archive content). I’ve seen some stuff online that talks about installing from tape using DAT, so it seems like in theory I should be able to just push the CD contents to a tape and go.

Can I use the 3.2.0 boot floppy images with a couple of DDS-1 tapes containing the files from the 3.2.5 CDs to directly install AIX 3.2.5? In what order should the files be put on the tapes? Or do I really need to do a complete install of 3.2.0 first?

Another important question: Will I need some sort of key to use the included AIXwindows and xlc, or should this stuff just work?

Finally, is there a complete set of post-release patches for AIX 3.2.5 online somewhere? I know 3.2.5 itself was primarily a patch roll-up release, I assume that with Y2K remediation and other bug fixes in the mid- and late-2000s there were a few additional patches released over time.

  -- Chris