[Info-vax] Alpha DVD

[Eberhard Heuser]

Am 22.06.2016 um 15:11 schrieb Stephen Hoffman via Info-vax:
> On 2016-06-22 02:12:11 +0000, David Froble said:
>
>> Does anyone know if any Alphas came with DVD drives?  Did ant itanics 
>> come with CD drives?
>
> The IDE/ATA/ATAPI-capable Alpha boxes can have (and some were even 
> supported with) DVD drives.  HP sold a few specific DVD drives 
> with/for Alpha, as part of that.   All of the Plextor drives I've 
> tried worked well with OpenVMS, too.   The DVD+R/RW formats and media 
> are likely to work better with some of the tools than the DVD-R/RW stuff.
>
>> Boss says I'm getting an itanic, RX2660 or something like that.  He 
>> doesn't listen when I say I don't want an itanic.  Now I'm going to 
>> have to learn how to run the damn thing.  Maybe it will have a DVD 
>> drive.
>
> Maybe he can get you a Windows 10 box, or a macOS or Linux box, too?
>
>

If you put in a DVD in a SCSI-DVD drive the drive switches to 2048 bytes 
per I/O. The Alpha bootstrap cannot handle this.

You have to use a CD. The Alpha firmware has a size limit how large the 
CD/DVD image is accessable during the bootstrap process.

Eberhard