[Info-vax] Issue with booting and/or seeing the SYSBOOT prompt

[Dymaxion Development]

Hi,

I am a OpenVMS newbie and I inherited trying to determine why a system no longer boots. It's an RX2600 running OpenVMS 8.4. The former system manager passed away so I really do not have any resources I could call upon.

The system starts up, loads the and see the disks...and then hangs. I cannot tell if it is waiting for an answer to a prompt or just doesn't proceed. I wanted to enable the SYSBOOT prompt to enable STARTUP_D2 to enable logging to see where it is hanging. But booting in conversational mode does the exact same thing. One of the boot options has VMS_FLAGS set to 0,1 for the same drive. And even I go into the EFI shell and set it, it hangs.

We have a backup drive which is a mirror of the system from a year ago. The MODPARAMS.DAT, AUTOPARAM.PAR and IA64VMSSYS.PAR are identical (the MODPARAMS.DAT compared via DIFF and the last two via CHECKSUM). I can successfully boot from that (we'd use it as the primary disk but it's a small drive and there is no client data on it nor would it fit). This drive also a conversational boot and it too hangs. In any case, the fact it does boot there are no hardware issues that could be preventing the system from booting.

I was hoping for tips on how to resolve being able to boot successfully or tell where in the boot process it is hanging. Or perhaps how I would go about transferring the OS from the backup disk to the primary disk.

Thanks in advance.

John