lunchbox VAXen, was Re: [HECnet] Introducing myself... and my little network

[Peter Coghlan]

Lunchboxes! :-)   And there are images for new boot ROMs available for
those which will allow you to boot from the on-board SCSI host adapter,
which is relatively slow (NCR5380-based) but still less painful than
trying to find, and then afford to purchase, an RD54.

I think someone even wrote a driver for VMS to use disks on that
controller.   I have several of those machines; I really should look into
that.   Does anyone have any further information on, or actual copies of,
those boot ROMs and/or the VMS device driver?


That's a patch for VAX/VMS 5.5-2 called PK2KDRVR which Wolfgang Moeller wrote
in response to the moaning years ago on comp.os.vms etc that the VS2000 would
be so much more useful if it could use SCSI disks. To his surprise, he found
there was very little interest in his solution. I was interested and I found
the patched driver worked well. I found I couldn't tell if it was slow or not
as the 2000 is so slow anyway! I never tried the patched boot ROMs as I boot
my 2000's from a 3100.

(How come I can remember this stuff and I have trouble remembering what
happened yesterday!)

Wolfgang also did patches for VS3100 boot ROMs which had problems booting
disks over 1GB in size.

I also have another patch he wrote which makes the floppy driver in a 2000
treat the drive as an RX23 instead of an RX33 making it possible for VMS to
correctly access 3.5in disks in a 2000.

I've put what I have on CEIRE::

(I can't find the original PK2KDRVR.ZIP so I've just zipped up the contents
of my PK2KDRVR directory which is likely what I got when I unzipped the
original zip file...)


Regards,
Peter Coghlan.