[Info-vax] booting from newer SANS

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-12-11 15:36:11 +0000, pcoviello at gmail.com said:

> On Friday, December 11, 2020 at 10:24:29 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2020-12-11 15:11:49 +0000, pcov... at gmail.com said:
>> 
>>> On Thursday, December 10, 2020 at 8:00:55 PM UTC-5, pcov... at gmail.com wrote:
>>>> ... Loading.: SSD Boot Device $1$DGA3010: FGA0.2031-0002-AC02-6B0D
>>>> ... Load of SSD Boot Device $1$DGA3010: FGA0.2031-0002-AC02-6B0D
>>>> failed: Not Found
>>> ... $ SET BOOTBLOCK /PRESERVE=SIGNATURES /I64 $1$DGA3010:
>> 
>> That command doesn't do what you think it does.
>> ...
> oh! interesting! I had found it the 8.4-2l1 install documentation and 
> thought it might help if there was an issue with the backup/image I did,

That command is intended to preserve the usefulness of an existing boot 
alias, by preserving the existing signature. If the existing signature 
wasn't working, preserving it is moot.

EFI prefers that the operating system to assign a new signature for 
each device and for each partition. EFI boots partitions. OpenVMS knows 
not of partitions and boots devices, whether newly installed or 
restored. OpenVMS doesn't align with EFI expectations there, and 
OpenVMS users tend to get cranky about having to remove and re-add boot 
aliases, that either from EFI directly, or from BOOT_OPTIONS.COM tool.

With no partitioning support, OpenVMS hacks up a whole device by 
creating between three and five partitions depending on file 
alignments. This to avoid console-level operations clobbering storage 
based on the expected partitioning map stored within GPT.

BACKUP, BTW, calls SYS$SETBOOTSHR, which is the underpinnings of SET 
BOOTBLOCK, and of the SYS$SETBOOT tool.

To see some more information, invoke SYS$SETBOOT as a foreign command. 
There's a simplistic partition-viewing and partition-reporting tool 
available there, too. There are four interfaces available underneath; 
CLD, RUN, foreign command, and callable API.

TL;DR: When EFI-based bootstraps go sideways, remove and re-add the 
boot alias entry, and try again.


-- 
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