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

[John Tran]

On Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 4:02:22 PM UTC-3, geze... at rlgsc.com wrote:
> 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

Yes I have image backups for the boot disk and the backup disk. I agree I would be SOL if not for the backup disk.

Could I repair things by backing [SYS0...] from the backup disk over to the primary disk?