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

[John Tran]

On Monday, October 25, 2021 at 12:01:24 PM UTC-3, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 10/25/2021 9:39 AM, Dymaxion Development wrote: 
> > 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. 
> >
> If you're going to use VMS for commercial purposes, you really should 
> become a VSI customer and subscribe to support. Get and use the latest 
> version of VMS.
> -- 
> David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450 
> Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: da... at tsoft-inc.com 
> DFE Ultralights, Inc. 
> 170 Grimplin Road 
> Vanderbilt, PA 15486

Something to keep in mind. Apparently there are a number of legacy owncode applications there that will need to be migrated, so we are stuck at a certain version level. That decision is above my pay grade, but certainly worth recommending to do them.

Thanks for all the help!