Setting up a VAXstation

[Liam Proven]

On 30/09/2007, Josef Chessor <josefcub at gmail.com> wrote:
> Liam,
>
> On 9/30/07, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Well, last night, I went and collected my first ever DEC box. It's a
> > VAXstation 3100/38, bought on eBay for 99p (UK£0.99).
> > [2] Friends have commented to me that a VAX of this age won't be able
> > to boot from CD-ROM. Somewhere, I have a hobbyist VMS CD, if I can
> > find it. It's been suggested to me that the easiest way to install
> > would be to install VMS onto SIMH on my PC, netboot the VAXstation off
> > the simulated VAX and install from one to the other. This sounds
> > moderately hairy to me. I'm not a VMS virgin but I've not used it in
> > 15y or so and I've never installed a machine from scratch - I just did
> > day-to-day sysop duties.
>
> Congratulations, by the way. :-)

Thanks!

> I went a slightly different route, lacking an appropriate CD-ROM
> drive:  I installed OpenVMS/VAX 7.2 Hobbyist onto a SIMH disk image,
> then DD'd the image onto a real SCSI drive in Unix.  My 3100 M38
> booted off the hard drive and has been quite happy since.

Gosh. I hadn't thought of that. I no longer use SCSI much on PCs, but
I could stick a card into my Linux box and do that, no problem...

> Installing from scratch isn't that hard.  There are a few tutorials
> (geared for SIMH) that'll get you started online, like this one:
>
> http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html

Thanks. I had already seen and read that. Moderately hairy, but I *am*
doing this to learn!

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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