[Info-vax] VSI software

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-08-05 13:58:34 +0000, Hans Bachner said:

> Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) schrieb am 05.08.2020 um 07:53:
>> 
>> In the past, I've had a bootable image on a hard disk.  Is there any 
>> reason that won't work, i.e. it has to be a DVD?
> 
> No. You can mount the ISO on a VMS system with the LD driver and BACKUP 
> /IMAGE the contents to a hard disk. I assume this is what Jan-Erik did 
> in his environment.

Sort of. You'll need to adjust the sector size settings.

Optical sectors are 2048 bytes.

Hard disk drives and SSDs are 512 or 4096 byte sectors for older 
storage and for current storage, respectively.

GPT embeds the sector size in its storage address and storage size data.

That adjustment is possible and the SET BOOTBLOCK command tries to do 
the right thing here. Sans adjustment, a direct restoration to a 
storage device with a different sector size can and variously will fail 
to boot.

Given the existing mess with the V7.3-2 system here, wiping and 
starting over and transferring over just user files is probably the 
fastest path.

Unfortunately, data migration from one system disk to another is not 
supported by OpenVMS. That's something I miss when working on OpenVMS, 
too.

But this is all a couple of years out too, and we don't know what 
distribution media will be used. For all we know, VSI will have joined 
the millennium, and ditched optical media for OpenVMS x86-64.


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