[HECnet] How to VMR S/A BRUSYS???

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-05-07 18:23, Bob Armstrong wrote:
BRUSYS is a standalone system that runs without any disk.

    Yep, that's what I thought.

It has all the necessary tasks in order to install a distribution on a
disk.
This is a system that is only intended for when you boot from tape.

    Well, that's one use.   But you can also use it to backup or copy the
system disk too (e.g. a disk to disk transfer).   That part is even
documented in the RSX manual.

Right, if you boot BRUSYS from a tape. If you actually booted from a disk, you'd use BRU on that disk for this instead.

If you copy BRUSYS.SYS to another disk, it should work just as well as from
the original disk.

    Sounds good, but in practice it doesn't.   Sorry...

Exactly what did you do for that to happen? It sounds more than strange.

So, whatever you did when you copied the file over to another disk was
probably
not doing what you thought you were doing.

    UFD DL0:[6,54]
    PIP DL0:[6,54]/CO=DU0:[6,54]*.*

Right. And then you do BOO DL:[6,54]BRUSYS, which should be just fine.

Any bootable disk is normally created by doing a build of a normal RSX
system,
copy all the files to the target disk, do a VMR on the target disk, boot
the
result, and then do a SAV /WB to dump the memory, and update the boot
block.

    Yep, that's basically what I did to create the bootable RSX system on DL0
from DU0.

    If you have any other suggestions, please let me know.   I'd really like to
get S/A BRU working on DL0.

There are some very important details here.
If you take your normal system and copy it over (I'm not talking about BRUSYS now), you will run a VMR on your new disk, using your SYSVMR.CMD and a copy of RSX11M.TSK copied into a new RSX11M.SYS. SYSTEM.CMD will then install all partitions, device drivers and tasks needed to get the system bootable. However, SYSVMR installs stuff using the device names LB: and SY:, so before running VMR, you need to make sure these names points to your new disk, or else you will install all tasks from a different disk. This is perfectly acceptable in VMR point of view, but when you boot your new disk, the "other" disk, where all the images are, is not mounted, and thus they will all be removed at boot time, and nothing will work.

So, essentially, getting a new disk set up, based on a current disk.

UFD xx:[1,1]
UFD xx:[1,54]
PIP xx:[1,1]=oo:[1,1]*.*
PIP xx:[1,54]=oo:[1,54]*.*
PIP xx:[1,54]RSX11M.SYS/CO/NV/BL:1026.=xx:[1,54]RSX11M.TSK
ASN LB:=xx:
ASN SY:=xx:
SET /UIC=[1,54]
VMR @SYSVMR
BOO [1,54]
SAV /WB

There are probably details you need to polish, but this should give you a rough idea.

(For M+, you also want [3,54], and of course there are plenty of other stuff you might want to suck over.)

	Johnny