[Info-vax] Issues with burning latest Hobbyist VAX/VMS ISO to CD?

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:21:08 -0700, BillPedersen wrote:

> I am following up on some queries I have been getting about issues with
> burning the latest Hobbyist VAX/VMS ISO to CD.
> 
> I have a report from a hobbyist which suggests he gets a "the selected
> disk file isn't valid" error from just about any method he has tried to
> burn the CD with.  He has suggested the "ISO format is old".  He has
> apparently tried with Windows 7, ISO Buster, and CDBurnerXP without
> luck.
> 
> So, I fully expect there are folks out there that have done this
> successfully, what did you use?  We would like to get this documented so
> we can help future Hobbyists.
> 

For Windows platforms, ImgBurn.  It supports a large number of drives and 
it's free.

http://www.imgburn.com/

I've just discovered they have a support forum as well.

http://forum.imgburn.com/

For Mac, I use Disk Utility.

For SimH or any of the Alpha emulators available I don't bother creating 
physical CDs or DVDs any more, I just use an image on disk.

If I have a physical CD or DVD, I'll copy that to a disk image using 
either Imgburn on Windows or Disk Utility on OS X first.  You will find 
that installations are normally much faster done from an image on disk 
rather than from a physical CD or DVD.

That applies not only to VMS hardware emulation hosts, but to the various 
virtual machines for other operating systems I run.

Another thought occurs to me, provided you have either a real Alpha or 
Itanium running a recent version of VMS (or other hardware capable of 
running Alpha/VMS under an emulator).  You can use the InfoServer 
capabilities of recent versions of VMS (Alpha V8.3, I64 V8.2-1 or later), 
to can serve bootable images up.

VAXman has an excellent write up about using an InfoServer to upgrade the 
firmware on a DS10L which had no floppy or CD drives, which includes 
incantations necessary for both the server and client sides.

http://tmesis.org/?e=40

Also see Hoff's site for InfoServer information.

http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/521

-- 
Paul Sture