Booting a VAXstation

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
> On Mar 15, 2010, at 2:20 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> I have a VAXstation 3100 model 38 I bought on eBay for the princely
>> sum of £0.99. Sadly it came without disks and I have no wide-SCSI
>> disks of <1GB.
>
>  That machine doesn't have wide SCSI.  It's 8-bit ("narrow") 10MHz.

I don't wish to question authority, as it were, but the internal
cables are 104 pin (If I'm counting them correctly) and the external
SCSI port on the back is 72-pin mini-D. That *looks* like wide SCSI to
me! If it's not, then what kind of cabling is it? The ordinary
narrow-SCSI stuff I knew from back in the '80s and '90s was 50-way
ribbon cables with 50-pin IDC connectors internally and either 50-pin
Centronics or D25 connectors externally.

>> As far as I know you can't boot a traditional VAX from a disk of
>> <1GB... but could I put the core of VMS on a small slow narrow SCSI
>> disk, like an
>> 80MB or something, and put most of it on the only Wide SCSI disk I
>> have, a 10GB...?
>
>  You can use a sub-1GB disk to boot from, yes.  Booting is, as I understand
> it, the only restriction.
>
>> Also, I have several external SCSI CD-ROMs, including 2 Apple units. I
>> seem to recall that VAXen want a weird block size, same as Sun kit...
>> is that correct? How would one tell if a certain drive could do this
>> or not? Is it a DIP switch setting or just a SCSI bus command?
>
>  You need a drive that supports 512-byte blocks.

Yes, but how do I *tell*, that's the question!


-- 
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