[Info-vax] OpenVMS Hobbyist licence - howto

[Chris Scheers]

Bob Eager wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:48:06 -0500, John Santos wrote:
> 
>> In article <hh7t52$psg$03$1 at news.t-online.com>, M.Kraemer at gsi.de
>> says...>
>>> Bob Eager schrieb:
>>>
>>>> Yes, I have a stock of DPES-31080. But an IBM 0662 was a fraction too
>>>> big. Note that this was in terms of what the console firmware
>>>> reported (too big, and it gave a silly small number, obviously the
>>>> size modulo 1GB).
>>>>
>>>> Another machine (VS model 60) tokk 4GB disks, but the IBM DDRS-34560
>>>> was too big before 'modification'.
>>> These 1, 2 and 4GB limits are not uncommon with antique systems. Ultrix
>>> <4.2 can't cope with 1GB+ disks, no version of Ultrix supports
>>> partitions >2GB, HP-UX <=9 doesn't install on disks >2GB, etc etc.
>>> I wasn't aware the more modern VS4000 line has such limitations too.
>> I'm 99.99% certain it doesn't.  The 6-byte SCSI command limitation only
>> applied to the firmware on some early 3100's. IIRC.  All the later
>> systems used 10-byte SCSI commands.
> 
> Pretty sure my VS4000-60 maxes out at 4GB.
> 
> But, as I said before (and it seems to have been lost in the welter of 
> comments) I wasn't suggesting that was because of 6-byte SCSI commands. 
> However, 4GB would be the limit of an unsigned 32 bit integer, and I 
> suspect the firmware just wraps at 4GB.
> 
> Doesn't matter once it's booted (if it boots) of course.

It is possible that it is a firmware issue.

On my 4000-60s and -90, the console reports the disk size modulo 8GB, so 
drives larger than 8GB report incorrectly.  They still work.  I use a 
couple of 10GB (8.5GB formatted) drives without problems.

The one problem I do see is that drives with a SCSI INQUIRY string that 
is longer than 15 bytes will not autoboot.  (I think the error code is 
D4.)  They will manually boot correctly.

Unfortunately, most newer drives seem to have long INQUIRY strings.

-- 
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Chris Scheers, Applied Synergy, Inc.

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