> 
> Net booting would definitely be the slickest way to do it, but not all
> VAXen have net boards (although of course they should!).
> 
On VAX-11 systems there is no support for netbooting at all, but when
we were talking about how to make the initial boot we found a couple
of possible ways, assuming that you already have got an OS on your VAX:

If you have VMS, you can write an small boot program on your console 
boot media that either adress up your ethernet card and net-boot from
another machine or boots up from tape, depending on dist media.

If you have Ultrix or BSD, use dd to get it on a new disk :)

If you have an uVAX with RX50 or something, write an bootable floppy
from nearest PC. You can also have an STABACKIT (or what it is called)
file that you write down on an TK50 and boots from that tape, a friend
of me here tried that it worked.

VAX 85/87/8800 can also be fooled to try to boot over ethernet if
you put strange things in the registers before starting VMB.

> I've been thinking of ways to solve the same problem, and it seems to
> me that if you need to write a bootable TK50 for your MicroVAX, the one
> machine you have that you can be sure is able to write TK50s, is your
> MicroVAX.  Since all VAXen have some form of serial console ROM, it
> shouldn't be too hard to write a program that runs on a PC (or whatever)
> and keys tape (or disk) blocks into VAX memory a block at a time and
> then deposits commands in the controller registers to write them out
> (or maybe deposits a small program to do it, I don't know if [T]MSCP
> controllers can use polled I/O).
> 
Yes, there is also an idea to have a list of hex codes that you 
deposit and then start, which reads the initial boot in from tape
or something. That was the way we installed 4.2BSD from distribution
tape :)

/Ragge