[Info-vax] OpenVMS Hobbyist licence - howto

[sadness]

On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:46:50 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:


>>    Displaying a size is different from talking to the disk.
>> And what was the important thing?
> 
> You are persistent...it didn't talk to the disk either.

that's strange because my vs4k-60 is running out of a 18Gb
scsi disk without trouble.
the firmware will show the disk size as 1.03Gb but i assure you 
that it has no trouble talking to the disk, booting VMS, and 
it just work without a problem.

i have a dozen of vaxstation 4000 around here, from the small vlc
to full loaded /96, never had problem with disk of 4Gb or more, in
fact the smallest disk i run in this sistem at the moment is a 4.5Gb
one, scaling up to a /96 with a pair of 36Gb in it.

maybe your /60 had an earlier firmware than mine ?

KA46-A V1.1-31E-V4.0

a show dev from firmware report the disk as a 1.03Gb one

  DKA200       A/2/0     DISK         1.03GB      FX            ST31840     0005

but have no trouble using it to start the system ...

>>> boot DKA200

-DKA200
%SYSBOOT-I-SYSBOOT Mapping the SYSDUMP.DMP on the System Disk
%SYSBOOT-I-SYSBOOT SYSDUMP.DMP on System Disk successfully mapped
%SYSBOOT-I-SYSBOOT Mapping PAGEFILE.SYS on the System Disk
%SYSBOOT-I-SYSBOOT SAVEDUMP parameter not set to protect the PAGEFILE.SYS
   OpenVMS (TM) VAX Version V7.2     Major version id = 1 Minor version id = 0

and VMS has no trouble with it

Disk DARON$DKA200:, device type SEAGATE ST318404LC, is online, mounted, file-
    oriented device, shareable, error logging is enabled.

    Error count                    0    Operations completed               3908
    Owner process                 ""    Owner UIC                      [SYSTEM]
    Owner process ID        00000000    Dev Prot            S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G:R,W
    Reference count               59    Default buffer size                 512
    Total blocks            33554432    Sectors per track                   165
    Total cylinders            33894    Tracks per cylinder                   6


as a side note, i have patched a number of 3100 firmware using the patch
made by Wolfang Moeller (http://home.claranet.nl/users/pb0aia/vax/vs-scsi.html)
to "correct" the 1Gb scsi limitation (6 byte addressing) with full success,
running it with 2Gb and 4Gb disk without a problem (so far).
(many thanks to Moeller for is work, i'm also running is patched firmware
with the pk2k scsi driver on a pair of vaxstation 2000, booting and running
it with scsi disk insted of the old mfm one)

-- 
Giuliano Paolo Brunetti 
member of the italian hobbyist DECnet network - decnet.ipv7.net