[HECnet] What started the modern VAX drive limit myth?

[Bob Armstrong]

There also seems to be no 1G boot drive limit on this as my boot drive is
about 4G.
Was this a limit that existed in earlier VAXstations?

  The ROM code in the VAXstation-3100s used only 32 bits for the SCSI LBA,
so that limited them to booting from disks less than 2Gb.   Later models
(like the 4000 you mentioned) fixed this, and there was never a limit.

  Actually even the 2GB limit on the 3100 could sometimes be ignored.   It
would still work with bigger disks so long as all the files the ROM needed
to access for booting were in the first 2GB (i.e. the upper bits of the LBA
were zeros).   If you'd just installed VMS on an empty disk, this was usually
the case.

  And this was only a problem with the ROM in the 3100.   Once you got VMS
booted the SCSI device driver had no issues with the disk size.

Bob