[Info-vax] InfoServer 150

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 1/27/19 5:25 AM, David Wade wrote:
> On 27/01/2019 02:18, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 1/26/19 7:33 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>> Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Not doing this from the command line.  I have three GUI based apps
>>>> and they all do it wrong.  Apparently they all see something wrong
>>>> with the images and refuse to just burn the data to a CD/R.
>>>
>>> They see a file that isn't a .iso file and like a good gui they figure
>>> you want to put that file into an ISO filesystem.  Rename the file to
>>> .iso and Brasero will do what you expect.
>>
>> No, actually it won't.  I tried it.  And Windows doesn't see it as
>> a valid .iso either so I am guessing Brasero knows what it is saying.
>>
>>>
>>> THIS is why you should use the command line.
>>
>> The command line can't make the file format correct.
>>
>>>
>>>> But these images are not .iso.  And just renaming them as one site
>>>> recommended doesn't help.
>>>
>>> The .iso is a straight disk image, what you'd get if you did a dd 
>>> from the
>>> raw disk device.  Your .img file is the same.
>>
>> Then the only possibility is that the files are corrupt.  We will
>> see when I get the Freeware 8.0 stuff unzipped on VMS.
>>
>>>
>>> Now, you have a second problem on Windows, in that you're using 
>>> something
>>> that checks to see that it's a recognizable filesystem, which it is not.
>>> Because Windows doesn't know anything about VMS filesystems.
>>
>> Why would it care about the file system if it is writing an image
>> to the disk?  Windows has happily written Plan9 and QNX and OS9000
>> and Ultrix and Linux and BSD.  Why would it suddenly be looking at
>> the contents of the ISO image just because it was Files-11?
> 
> I assume because for all the above the CD is written as an ISO 9660 file 
> system (or something that approximates to it.) not the native file 
> system of the OS for which they are for. This is certainly true for 
> Linux and BSD and I assume Ultrix. OS/2 works that way. No HPFS on a CD..
> 
> In order to boot a CD on VAX it needs to be in the native file system so 
> its not an ISO CD as per the standard. Many CD writers will only write 
> CDs in audio format or ISO9660 so won't write VAX CDs.

No problem writing VAX CD's for BSD or Ultrix-32.  ONly the Infoserver
stuff, so far.  I have never tried VMS as I have always had real CD/s
for that.

> 
> Windows will error if you try and mount them
> 
> You can try booting a CD in SIMH to check its OK.

If I wanted to run SIMH I wouldn't be trying to get real
hardware going.  :-)  And someone recently stated that
the Infoserver software had  not been tried on SIMH that
anyone knew of so a failure would still leave you with
no idea why.

I am going to try putting the image on a hard disk and see
if that will boot.  I now have a fresh copy taken from the
ZIP Files HP distributes which put them several layers down
inside otehr ZIP Files.  Hopefully unzipping on VMS will
have ensured that the files are not getting corrupted.


bill