[Info-vax] Help needed booting VAX 4000-200 from Alpha using Infoserver utility

[terry-groups at glaver.org]

On Wednesday, March 20, 2019 at 3:59:28 PM UTC-4, terry-... at glaver.org wrote:
> I have never used the Infoserver utility on Alpha VMS, but this VAX 4000-200 has no optical drive and a broken tape drive, so I'm somewhat limited in my boot options to get VMS 7.3 installed.

I was able to work around this via a very convoluted process - I used the VMS 5.4-3 that was on the system disk on the 4000 to create a bootable standalone backup on a second drive, then FTP'd over the VMS073.* files from my Alpha. I then used the running VMS 5.4-3 to restore the VMS073.B kit to a third drive (BACKUP complained about unknown attributes in the save set, since it is a V5.4 BACKUP trying to read a V7.3 saveset). I then booted the third drive (with VMS 7.3 on it) and used STABACKIT to update the standalone backup on the second drive. I then booted the second drive and repeated the VMS 7.3 install on the third drive - since this was now a 7.3 standalone backup reading a 7.3 installation saveset, it completed without errors. Now I just need to shuffle drives around and install licenses and layered products.

I'd still be interested in any ideas why the Infoserver boot method didn't work.