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

[BillPedersen]

On Saturday, April 7, 2012 5:17:15 AM UTC-4, Paul Sture wrote:
> 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

Found that ImgBurn has a similar problem with this CD image from 2001...

Some have suggested doing it on VMS. The issue is less of doing it on VMS as it is in preparing the media for a “newbie” to use with new hardware or a new emulator.

It appears that the image which is the distribution of VAX/VMS is actually an ODS-2 image which had been laid down on a CD and was bootable in that sense.

I have just taken a REAL CD distribution of VAX/VMS 7.3 and created an image.  It is exactly the same size as the distribution which is being sent out – so I expect it is the same image.

It does appear that the ISO file type is causing the issue to the Windows based applications.

Of course, given that it is just a disk image it can be booted as a disk image rather than burn it onto a CD for booting. This is especially easy for emulators.  Only is you have a physical system with a CD do you then need to burn to media.

I have found that by playing some games you can get a burner to write the image to the CD.  The trick I took here was to duplicate the data files for the restoration of an image which was the same size as the image I wanted to put there.  The file describing the image was all text so this could be recreated as necessary.  The linkages are all through the file names.  This as using Cyberlink DVD Suite Deluxe…

So it can be done.  It is just that you have to tell the burner that it is NOT an ISO image.  I suspect this can be done with most of the burners if you look carefully.  But it seems like some of the burners have taken it upon themselves to use ISO file type as the key to forcing the format.

Thanks to all for your comments and suggestions.  

Bill.