On Mon, 22 Jun 1998, Seth J. Morabito wrote:
> > Saturday at the local swapmeet, I picked up a MicroVAX 2000.
>
> Aaah, MicroVAX! One of my favorite computers :) Congratulations!
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> The MicroVAX and VAXstation 2000's take MFM harddrives, usually the DEC
> RD-series (RD52, RD53, RD54). If you can get your hands on an RD54,
> that's what you'll want -- around 170MB, plenty of room for a "full-ish"
Sounds like a Maxtor 2190 clone.
> VMS 5.5-2 installation. I really don't know about the resistor board,
> though -- I'm afraid I've never seen one.
>
> Back to that SCSI -- the SCSI in the MicroVAX 2000 was for use only
> with the TK50Z-FA tape drive, a 95MB cartridge tape system which looks
> almost exactly like today's fancy DLT tapes (It's DLT's grandfather,
> pretty much). TK50 is an extremely common format for older (early to
> mid-80's) DEC software distributions. The firmware in the MicroVAX
> makes it impossible to boot off of any SCSI device besides the TK50,
> unfortunately.
Is that the 4" square (about) tape cartridge that i see a lot of
occasionally?
> It sounds like you don't have the external connector option that had
> a 50-pin Centronics (for the TK50) and a 50-pin D-sub connector for
> external MFM drives. That means you can pretty much safely ignore the
> NCR53C80, unfortunately :)
No, but there are a 50-pin and a 60-pin header on the motherboard that
are not presently used.
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> You didn't mention another connector, but I believe there has to be
> either a BNC connector (for thinnet) or a 15-pin Thicknet connector on
> the back of the system, toward the upper right. Look for a connector
> that has a hash-mark (#) next to it. This is your 10mbps ethernet.
> (Lance ethernet, I think?)
The BNC is there, I just flat forgot to mention it.
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> a disk, your options are pretty limited right now: You can run it as
> a diskless machine in a VMS VAXcluster, or you can netboot NetBSD from
> another system. I've been doing that with mine for a while, and it
> works fairly well, though it's tricky to set up. See:
The VMS VAXcluster is not an option, but the netboot may be.
> http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/vax/index.html
>
> for details, and
>
> http://world.std.com/~bdc/projects/vaxen/index.html
>
> for excellent info about netbooting NetBSD.
>
> Good luck!
Thanks! I will probably need it. My only other DEC experience is with
the Rainbow :)
- don
Received on Mon Jun 22 1998 - 23:49:27 BST