Hi,

here is the next movement:

After I found out that the ULTRIX 4.5 tape's standalone kernel
doesn't support the 6400, even though ULTRIX 4.5 says it supports
the 6400 and 6500, (duh!) I had to help myself. Fortunately there
is SIMH/VAX and with that I could install ULTRIX 4.5 (manually,
the scripts didn't work). Now I have the image of an RA90 drive
with a proven bootable kernel and the basic distribution that
will allow me to do everything else from there, once that is up.

This is what I did to transfer that image to an RA90:

1) net-boot uVAX-II with NetBSD from my FreeBSD laptop :-)
2) write the gzip-ed image ra90.bin.gz to a TK50 tape

# dd if=ra90.bin.gz of=/dev/rmt0 ibs=1024000 obs=512

3) boot VAX6400 with VMS
4) on VMS transfer the gzip-ed file to a VMS disk file

$ MOUNT/FOREIGN/BLOCK=512/RECORD=512 MUC6:
$ COPY MUC6: RA90_BIN.GZ

5) mount an RA90 disk forreign

$ MOUNT/FOREIGN DUA1:

6) unzip and transfer to that disk

$ GZIP :== $SYS$ROOT:[GUNTHER]GZIP.EXE
$ DEFINE/USER SYS$OUTPUT DUA1:
$ GZIP -d -c RA90_BIN.GZ

the hope is that the above would emulate what on UNIX
would have been:

# gzip -d -c ra90.bin.gz |dd of=/dev/rra1c bs=512

7) that takes forever. After an hour or so, I stopped the
process, because I figured I didn't have to write all those
trailing zero-bytes to the disk.

8) cheked if anything reasonable had been written to the disk

$ TYPE DUA1:

and indeed, garbage shows up that looks like it is the first
blocks of that image.

8) reboot VAX6400

 >>> BOOT /R:0001000B /XMI:B DUA1

when it comes to loading system software, it immediately HALTs
after accessing the disk for a moment. Sounds to me as if
it didn't quite get a proper executable master boot block.

The question to all VMS gurus is then: did I do anything wrong
with the mount/foreign dua1, what is the blocking used? Since
I cannot specify /block and /record for disks, I assume that
the block is one sector. Does VMS write to the sectors in a
different ordering? Does a mount/foreign spare the master boot
blocks and begin writing with an offset of a few sectors?

Thanks,
-Gunther

PS: I guess if noone can give me a hunch on how to do this simple
thing with VMS, I will just have to wait until I get my KDA50 boards
to use with my uVAX-II so that I can write the disk using NetBSD.
Ah the fun of interfacing!

-- 
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow@regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org