VAX 11/780 anyone with some working experience out there?

From: Johnny Billquist <bqt_at_update.uu.se>
Date: Thu Dec 26 13:19:01 2002

On Wed, 25 Dec 2002, Gunther Schadow wrote:

> Jonny's boot com file helped a little. At least I now know that
> something doesn't work (and not just me not knowing what to do :-)

Assuming that you have a working disk... :-)
Glad the file came through. Seems some virus catchers are of the opinion
that my boot.com is a virus. :-)

> Although it's still looking pretty bad. I'm afraid the cold
> garage is causing some damage to the VAX. I did run the TEST
> again and got an error where I didn't get one last time. Now
> it complains that M8230 is defective ...

That's definitely a bad sign.

> This time I got up until a "BOOT-F-Unexpected Machine Check" somewhere
> inside VMB.EXE running.

Okay. So VMB is running. That's good news. Do you have any kind of system
on any disk, that should boot (Ultrix, VMS, 4.3BSD ?).

> I could never see any sign of special
> activity, neither from the RA90 drive nor the UDA-50.

It would flicker very briefly, but I suppose you should see some
action. Anyhow, the A or B button should light up if things are working.
I assume you have the cabling correct. You know. The total number of
cables between the UDA-50 and the disk must be an odd number.
And that you have the A and/or B channel selected (matching your cables
connection).

> The UDA-50
> shows the cycling pattern on the LEDs, not unlike the KDA-50 in
> my VAX6000s.

That's the normal idle pattern. Shows that the UDA-50 is working
correctly.

> It could be that I messed up the UDA-50s hardware
> address, so it may never be talked to. Is there a way of examining
> UNIBUS addresses from the console, so that I could see if some
> magic number comes up at a certain address on the UDA-50 that
> would indicate that I have the right hardware address?

Yech. Yes, it can be done. No, I won't try to tell you how. Perhaps
someone a little more familiar with the unibus map and all the stuff can
help out (probably ragge, or someone else who have played exensively with
it). I'm just happy I don't have to. I could probably figure it out if I
had to, but it's a minor headache.

Basically you have to just configure the unibus map, and then find the
UDA-50 in the address range that UBA have. The UDA-50 should be at 772150
(8) in that range.

> As for VMS, at this time I have the VMS 5.2 disk hooked on the
> 780, and I would gladly take VMS for now if it would get that
> far at all.

Well, if you have a known working VMS disk, set it to write protect, and
then try booting it.

        Johnny

Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
                                  || on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt_at_update.uu.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
Received on Thu Dec 26 2002 - 13:19:01 GMT