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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-05-07 18:02, Bob Armstrong wrote:
    I've built an RSX system (Yipee :-)   I've even figured out how to VMR it
if I change the configuration or move it to another device.   Cool!

    In [6,54] there's a BRUSYS.SYS which I'm guessing is supposed to be a
standalone BRU system.   I can boot it on my original disk and it works
great, but if I copy the contents of [6,54] to another drive then it doesn't
work anymore.   I can still boot it, but it no longer knows about any tasks
(e.g. BAD, BRU, etc).   I'm guessing that it needs to be VMR'ed in its new
home so that it can find the task files on the new disk.

    But what's the procedure for doing this?   For the real system there's a
RSX11M.TSK file in [1,54] as well as a SYSVMR.CMD file that you use to
actually build the bootable system.   Where's the command file for VMRing
BRUSYS?   And what's the unconfigured system that you start from?   And what's
the VMRM64.TSK file in [6,54] for (I'm guessing it has something to do with
all this)?

BRUSYS is a standalone system that runs without any disk. 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.

VMRM46.TSK is a plain 11M V4.6 VMR task. It is good to have since its a known version matching all the needs to write your BRUSYS to a bootable tape.

If you copy BRUSYS.SYS to another disk, it should work just as well as from the original disk. All tasks needed are actually included in the image file (think of BRUSYS.SYS as a memory dump).
You cannot set up a disk to boot BRUSYS from scratch.
Booting from scratch to a disk requires that you first boot up the system, and then save it again, and update the boot block. BRUSYS do not have that ability.

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

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.

To create a bootable tape, on the other hand, you use VMR. VMR have a SAV command as well, which writes to tapes, and creates a bootable tape with the system you are manipulating.

	Johnny