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

[Dymaxion Development]

On Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 9:27:55 AM UTC-3, 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

The KVM console display though it says serial is not serial, just a VGA display. Once I got a serial connection in place, it turns out the problem was that there was no VMS IA64 license in place or not found. :( It's there in the backup disk but not in the primary boot disk. As a result, the system did not continue with the boot process and just logged off.

I will copy the license from the recovery to the primary disk and see where that takes me.

Thanks to all with serial connection help and other boot process tips. You certainly gave this newbie some insight on where to go to get things working.