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

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

BillPedersen wrote 2012-04-07 13:16:
> 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.

As written in other posts, that is not always needed.
I upgraded my DS25 using the ISO file without using the CD drive.
This doesn't work for a new/clean install, of course.

I *did* burned a copy on CD (using something called "CDBurnerXP" on my'Win7 
laptop), but never tried to boot it. I can check at office
if that CD boots at all. There was no errors while burning, as far
as I remember.

I guess "it depends", as usualy. :-)

Regrads,
Jan-Erik.



>
> 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.