3B2 progress

Mon May 26 22:33:55 CDT 2008

About a year ago I was given a 3B2 1000/70 by Josh Dersch that I've finally 
gotten UNIX booted on (in a fashon). I've been spoiled by modern variants of 
UNIX that include the disklabel program in the miniroot, and it seems that 3B2 
System V doesn't.

The FAQs seem to address either installing on a MFM drive (V3 (500+) 3B2s are 
SCSI based), or bringing up a drive in parallel with a valid install (the 
original drive died), or installing on an AT&T sourced drive that's already been 
labeled (not an option).

(A) Does anybody have the "3B2 Computer Maintenance Utilities" or "IDtools" 
floppy image floating around, or is this the one that I have with filledt and 
dgmon on it?

(B) is the SCSI-FMT tape the equivalent of IRIX's standalone fx for setting 
up completely blank disks? (the one I'm using is an ex-Sun Seagate).

(C) backplane slots: my machine is an interesting hybrid: it's a 3B2-1000/80 
backplane with a 3B2-1000/70 system board. I'm trying to figure out if I have 
Pbus (looks like these are just an extention of the system bus), BµBus (some 
buffered permutation of the above?), or something else entirely, since this 
machine came to me with a PE card (multiprocessor board). How much of the wiring 
is backplane-dependant, and how much is system board dependant?

Anyone have spare bits for one of these? I wouldn't mind a network card, or 
more I/O (serial or serial/parallel).

One further warning: if you use a SCSI cable scavanged from a dead HP 9000 
Nova class (or the HP 3000 equivalent), be forewarned that on the end that 
connects to the backplane the IDC connector is installed backwards (as opposed to 
the ends that connect to the disks). I blindly assumed that SCSI was SCSI and d
idn't think to check until it didn't work.

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