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

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Paul Sture wrote 2012-04-07 11:17:
> 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.

On my DS25, I simply copied the "ISO" as supplied by HP to a spare
SCSI disk (in the 6-disk cage in the DS25) and booted from that.

I was a simple :

$ mount/for <device>
$ copy ALPHA084.ISO <device>

and then shutdown and >>> boot <device>
and from that run the upgrade as usual.

Note also that the two LP ISO's can simply be CONNECT'ed
by LD and then mounted. No need for any CD's at all.

And since the ISO's was FTPed directly to the DS25, this was
a VMS-only solution with no other platform involved. :-)

Jan-Erik.

>
> 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
>