Last night I used Warren Toomey's VTserver to download the 2.11BSD boot partition to a cold PDP-11/53 that I put together from the following parts:
-KDJ11-PB CPU board from a DECserver 500 (bought for $10 on eBay)
-Andromeda UDC11 MFM disk controller (like RQDX3?) from my 11/23
-Maxtor XT-2190 hard drive from a MicroVAX (head 13 bad, so only 130 meg)
-DSD StackPac chassis and front panel
I am not a UNIX expert. I need a place to ask ignorant* questions, and get meaningful and prompt answers. Is this the right place?
Here are the first couple questions:
At boot-up, right after it tells me about how much memory I have, it starts spitting gibberish. If I tell Kermit (my console) to switch to 7 bits even parity, I can read stuff again. It appears that the OS is changing the line parameters. Does this make sense? If so, where do I find the file with this config in it? I grepped for "stty" in / and /etc but didn't find anything useful looking.
I still can boot RT-11 from the floppy, but when I try to boot UNIX from the hard drive it halts. I did "dd if=/mdec/rauboot of=/dev/ra0a count=1" per Steve Schultz's instructions, but it still won't boot. I can download Warren's boot.dd via VTserver, and type "ra(0,0,0)unix", and UNIX starts right up, so the only problem is the boot sector. It used to boot RT-11 from hard drive fine, before I clobbered it with UNIX. The only catch is that I have to toggle HALT and say "171000G" (there's a boot ROM on the disk controller) because the CPU boot ROMs at 173000 are some goofy DECserver stuff. Any ideas?
I partitioned the hard drive with 4.5 meg at ra0a, 4 meg at ra0b, and the rest at ra0d. Was I supposed to disklabel ra0d as "2.11BSD" or leave it "unused" -- the instructions didn't say. When I try to newfs to /dev/ra0d, it gives me "not a character device". Here's ra0d:
ls -l /dev/ra0d
brw-r----- 1 root 5, 3 Sep 7 1987 /dev/ra0d
I need a way to download the rest of the UNIX tar files over the console line. VTserver's documentation sort of stops after booting up the root image. Where do I go from here? Is there some built-in way of using a serial line driver like a tape, such as "tar xvf /dev/tty"?
* "Ignorance can be fixed; stupid is forever."
--
Jonathan Engdahl Rockwell Automation
Principal Research Engineer 24800 Tungsten Road
Advanced Technology Euclid, OH 44117 USA
Euclid Labs http://users.safeaccess.com/engdahl
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Received on Sat May 26 2001 - 15:53:42 BST