MicroVAX help

From: Richard A. Cini, Jr. <rcini_at_classic.msn.com>
Date: Fri Sep 5 21:02:10 1997

Hello, all:

        Well, I got the RD52 external HD on my MicroVAX-I working tonight. I swapped
the blown power supply with a new surplus one. Had to redrill the case, but oh
well. I also figured out that the VAX external drive cable is the same as a
DB50 SCSI cable.

        So, the VAX now recognizes that there is an external drive device at
/dev/rra1h but it complains that it has a bad superblock and a wrong magic
number. It also once complained of a hard error "sn16". Sounds to me that it
needs to be reformatted, or whatever the Ultrix equivalent of "fdisk /mbr" is
to rebuild the boot block.

        Here are a few questions:

        1. Since I don't know what is on the drive in the first place, how
                do I avoid a permanent destruction of the file system yet still
                correcting the problem?

        2. If <1> is not possible, how do I go about fixing the problem. I
                could not find a program named "fdisk", so either it had been
                deleted from the root partition, or it's under another name.

        3. The only way that I could get the drive to respond is to put
                the cable in the middle connector (J2). The drive did not
                respond at all in J1 or J3. There must be jumpers somewhere
                that govern this, like on the buss extender card, but I have
                no jumper map.

        4. {unrelated} Every time I restart the uVAX, it complains about
                the time needing to be reset. Do the uVAXen have internal
                clock batteries that have to be recharged/replaced?

        TIA for any help!

+============================================+
| Rich Cini/WUGNET |
| <rcini_at_msn.com> |
| MCP Windows 95 and Windows Networking, |
| Charter ClubWin! Member (6) and a |
| collector of classic computers |
+============================================+
Received on Fri Sep 05 1997 - 21:02:10 BST