[HECnet] Alpha emulation?

[Marc Chametzky]

I ran into some strange problems with my Alpha CD. I was told that there were "bad blocks" found in the PCSI database during verification. The machine came up, so it appears to be okay, but I don't know that my installation completed successfully. I tried reimaging the CD I have into fresh ISOs, but they all come out the same.

For anyone who is curious how this ended up, I looked at Bob's image, and it was identical to mine, same size and same checksum.

I did some reinstallation attempts and finally tracked down the problem to trying to install DECwindows Motif. If I selected that package (not just the libraries, but the actual server component), I get this error during installation:

Portion done: 0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%
%PCSI-E-PDBFAILVAL, the product database failed verification due to an internal inconsistency
%PCSI-E-PDBFILERR, file PCSI$UPDATE_8.PCSI$DATABASE;1 failed with the following error:
-LIB-F-BADBLOSIZ, bad block size
%PCSI-E-PDBFAILVAL, the product database failed verification due to an internal inconsistency
%PCSI-E-S_OPFAIL, operation failed
%PCSIUI-E-ABORT, operation terminated due to an unrecoverable error condition

If I don't select DECwindows Motif, then OpenVMS installs just fine. I guess there may be something wrong with the Motif PCSI package. Fortunately, I have no need for it to be installed, so I'll redo the installation without it and get a clean install going.

--Marc