VAX/VLC firmware upgrade?

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Tue May 2 02:57:29 2000

>Any problems with drives going offline? I've spent the last couple hours
>fighting with this blasted one I just got. Decided it must be the 2GB HD
>(it's a 3rd party drive) so put the RZ23L in, got a bit farther before it
>to decided to go off-line.

No issues in that regard. I'm running the RZ24L that came inside of it. I
did get the occasional bit of flakiness before I got it terminated but once
that was done loaded VMS and NetBSD just fine. I'm using a Sun CD-ROM to
load is (I know, Horrors!) Its only a 2x drive but it does work.

>Plus I think it dislikes my 'floater' CD-ROM. This is the CD-ROM I use on
>*everything* that's SCSI. The wierd thing is, I've used it to load other
>DEC systems, but I had to flip the blocksize switch, and I'm just about
>positive I just flipped it to 2048-byte blocks, WTF!

I don't think that's the issue. Perhaps your drive is attempting to
negotiate disconnect/reconnect behaviour and the VLC isn't telling it not
to? What happens with the drive goes off line, just it just hang or is
there and error message to that effect? On my M76 I took off the delayed
spin-up jumper to insure that the drive was there when probed but I don't
think the VLC cares.

The other thing of course is to be sure that you're not running one of the
drives as ID 6, and perhaps consider moving the disk to a different ID (I
don't know if disconnect/recconect might "assume" the computer is 7 but you
never know.)

>I'm starting to think the only way I'll get this system up is to boot it
>into my cluster as a diskless client! Grrr!

Should work :-)

>BTW, I'm 1.3 on my firmware.

If I figure out how to change it I'll make it available for other VLC owners.

On a whim I connected up the keyboard/monitor and booted VMS. It came up
but when I logged on it said "Can't Determine Terminal Type" and scrolls
the screen about half way down. I thought VMS might be smart enough to know
it was using the framebuffer but I guess not.

--Chuck
Received on Tue May 02 2000 - 02:57:29 BST

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