[Info-vax] Alpha Personal Workstation 433au -

[thedavegray at gmail.com]

On Wednesday, 6 November 2019 20:38:57 UTC, Stephen Hoffman  wrote:

> That revert-to-AlphaBIOS/ARC behavior usually means the battery is dead.

Yes that appears to be correct. I came back an hour later, switched it on and the CMOS has gone back to Windows.  I chnaged it and powered off and it booed to SRM.

> 

> 
> Boot a distribution kit via CD-ROM or via OpenVMS installed on another 
> disk, and re-run a SET BOOTBLOCK command targeting the volume.  (Or 
> invoke WRITEBOOT, if you're into older approaches.)

Ok so I can boot this from a V7.3-1 CDROM but neither of those commands are available, or at least shown in the help. 



> But I wouldn't do that here.
> 
> Scrounge a distribution kit and licenses from the HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist 
> program, and wipe and reinstall OpenVMS Alpha.
> 
> Existing installs have who-knows-what left around, and it's usually 
> saner for all folks involved to treat this like a new system, and start 
> over.
> 

Yes I will do that once I get it booting and see what is on there.  There may be some licenses I want to salvage.