[Info-vax] Best "Standalone" boot versions for Alpha and Itanium

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-01-13 00:55:59 +0000, Rich Jordan said:

> I thought the rx3600 was able to boot from a USB stick...

USB boots were hit-or-miss, when last I officially knew.   Which was an 
aeon or two ago.   Some USB flash drives worked great, others didn't.   
Never got to the bottom of the differences, either.  Media was 
identical, bootstraps on some media worked fine, failed utterly on 
other and ostensibly-identical USB flash media from a different vendor.

Bring an Itanium or an Alpha, and boot the system from InfoServer, or 
perform copies there.   Pre-configured for InfoServer host bootstraps.  
  Bring the box with a shelf or two of disks (or fewer and vastly 
bigger disks than your rx3600 has), and use it as a backup server.   
Downside: GbE isn't that fast, and you'll have to do some fancy DCL to 
get the BACKUP (with compression) running in parallel.   Likely faster 
to swap the disks over into the loaner / spare / visiting OpenVMS box 
and blast out backups there.


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