MicroVAX help

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Fri Sep 5 22:58:16 1997

<Well, I got the RD52 external HD on my MicroVAX-I working tonight. I swapp
<the blown power supply with a new surplus one. Had to redrill the case, but

A microvax-1? Really? Are you sure of that?

Most of them couldn't support enough memory to run netbsd or ultrix.
Generally in their day it was 2mb, sometimes 3mb. The reason was the CPU
was two boards and memory at the time was either 512k or 1mb per board and
there was only 8 slots in a ba23. so the typical line up was cpu, 4 memory
cards, an rqdx2 disk and a DHV or DZV serial card. the problem was that
would put the power supply 20% over the top!

<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?

Well you have to know whats on the drive first. I've never seen a MV-1
running ultrix though it may be possible.

<
<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.

If it's ultrix then most unix conventions apply.

If you booted in single user mode you do not have full access to the system.

<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.

???? is this a ba23 or ba123? In a ba23 the rd52 disk is connected via
two cables to bulkhead J7 and J2. if its a ba123 with M9058 distribution
board then it's rd0(bottom most connector pair).

A third possibility is a two box ba23 system using a RQDXE, though drive 0
is nominally in the main box and the rqdxe is only needed for 3 or more
drives (including the floppy).

<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!

Yes on the back of the console connector there is a battery pack of three
aaa sized nicads. pull them and charge them by hand. if they don't charge
you can find similar packs in many dec systems (rainbow, any ba23 or ba123
or vs2000 box). Also you can use any three cell pack for cordless phones
that fit.


Allison
Received on Fri Sep 05 1997 - 22:58:16 BST