[HECnet] VS4000/90: Up and running!

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-02-08 21:52, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons wrote:
Oh, now I need a disk for that machine. Right now it is running diskless as a satellite of my 4000/60,
paging via ethernet (ouch!). I have some SCA-68-50 pin adapters for SCSI disks, and I have used those
with success with 4GB drives, but I have read somewhere the vaxstation firmware can't handle disks bigger
than that. Anyone knows if that is true? Can I plug in a generic, big SCSI disk and hope it will work?

Sigh. The misinformation that keeps spreading. The problem is for specific older VAXen. I think it's even only specific 3100 models. And the problem is just that the boot rom uses a more restricted disk block addressing, limiting the booting to disks of less than 1G. (Actually, you can boot from larger disks as well, as long as the boot rom don't need to read from anything above 1G.)

Once the OS starts, it uses its own device driver, and then you don't have the restriction either.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol