[HECnet] Problems with Alphaserver ES45 and FC disks

[Ian McLaughlin]

Hello All,

I recently acquired/rescued a rack of Alphaserver gear that was going to get scrapped.  In the rack is two ES45 servers (with no local drive cages), and a 3-shelf HSG80 Fibre Channel disk system. There were no drives, but I have plenty of this form factor and so I’ve fully populated all three shelves.

The original system apparently ran Tru64 Unix, but I don’t have much interest in that. I’d love to get the two machines running in an OpenVMS cluster.

I’ve managed to figure out the HSG80 array, and I am serving up acouple of FC LUNs.  I can verify this because I’ve got wwidmgr on the Alpha’s to see and create a drive (dgb2).

However, when I attempt to boot OpenVMS Alpha 8.4 from CD-ROM, the install process doesn’t recognize the FC drive and offer it as an installation target.

Is anyone familiar with this generation of gear and possibly give me a pointer or two about what I might be doing wrong?

Perhaps I need a newer OpenVMS install? Is there ISO images of various versions lurking around hecNET that anyone is willing to share?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Ian