[Info-vax] USB or SCSI TAPE

[Rod Regier]

I have wandered thru the available documentation for OpenVMS and related threads on OpenVMS USB support.  All of the information I can find is that there is no OpenVMS driver support for USB tape drives on any of the Integrity family servers.

As of 09-Nov-2011 (V/I64 8.4) HP only officially supports keyboard, mouse and optical media boot as USB devices.

No mention is made for USB R/W mass storage devices like disks or DAT drives. 

Too bad, USB DAT drives are the wave of the future.

In a related vein:

The HP employee who wrote the USB device driver says on the topic of boot from R/W USB mass storage:

"...it had been slipped in by Fred (Kleinsorge) a parting gift on 
|his way out.  I only have read only access to comp.os.vms.  Can you 
|post a note saying the official position is that USB booting is only 
|suppoted for the systems that have USB DVD's.  That is it and no one 
|will lift a finger to help beyond that.  There is no magic required to 
|boot a VMS system off a USB pen drive or disk drive.  You need to back 
|up a working system to the device and make sure that the boot block 
|gets updated.  That is it, for DVD's you have to set the sysgen 
|paramter write lock sys to boot. 
| 
|    If it hangs in the boot in mount verify the run time drivers are 
|having a problem with the device, there is a complex dance that 
|happens to determine data about the disk.  In fact Fred rewrote much 
|of it about 12-16 months ago to make it work with more devices.  That 
|code should be in recent patch kits. 
| 
|     But if that does not help they will get nothing out of HP there 
|is no one home who understands how it all works.  There is a complex 
|set of steps and interlocks that all have to go correct to boot off a 
|USB mass storage device any one messes up and you hang or crash.  It 
|took me weeks to make it all work the first time and even then it was 
|fragile."