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

[Bob Gezelter]

On Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 8:27:55 AM UTC-4, Dymaxion Development wrote:
> 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
John,

The parameter words, e.g. "0,1" can be set to a variety of HEXADECIMAL values:
-  0,1 does a simple conversational boot from the SYS0 directory.
- 1,0 does a non-conversational boot
- 0,30001 does a conversational bootstrap from SYS0 with detailed messages

Reference: Segment of the OpenVMS FAQ, maintained by Stephen "Hoff" Hoffman at http://hoffmanlabs.org/vmsfaq/vmsfaq_022.html

I would suggest turning on the bootstrap debugging messages, possibly only 0,20001 to start and see what is reported. Use a terminal emulator with output logging to capture the output, it can be voluminous.

In any event, the copy of the system disk is bootable, and you can use it to manually mount the misbehaving  volume and at least get a backup. Once you have a backup, then your data is at least safe.

Have dealt with this kind of thing more than a few times, in years past, e.g., MicroVAX II, it could be a chore when storage was precious and the only removable media was 400KB floppies. With today's mass storage, it is far less of a chore. Take care with that backup, it is your safety net. So long as one's backup is intact, one can always restart the recovery process.

If you need detailed assistance, there are several of us in this forum, myself included, who do thing like this for a living.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com