topic Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation in Operating System - OpenVMS

DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

khanh ha — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:26:01 GMT

Hello all,
I am totally new to VAX/VMS, I am trying to connect an external scsi optical drive (DEC RWZ52)to my VAX4000-105. run sho dev at >>> prompt show detection as *KA100, but after system was booted, the device is not shown. Checked this forum for answer to problem, there is a similar posted by "bbetts", he did resolved the problem by loading the driver using sysgen and connect command, but did not show detail instruction.

Please help! Thanks in advance.

Khanh

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

Volker Halle — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:59:01 GMT

Khanh,

it looks like you may need to have the OSDS/OSMS software installed to be able to connect a RWZ52 WORM drive using WDDRIVER and WD$STARTUP.COM

Volker.

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

khanh ha — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:19:50 GMT

Thanks Volker, is that the only way for my problem? is that mean i have to buy OSDS/OSMS software package? or the driver should have came with the drive?

Thanks

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

Colin Butcher — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:31:34 GMT

Hello,

Because of the way the drive works you need a layer of software between the operating system and the device to process the file system data. A "write once" drive cannot have a block that's already been written written again - and a normal file system relies on reading and updating certain disc blocks to maintain the underlying structures. Obviously that can't happen with an optical "write once" drive. Even with a re-writable optical drive it's a slow process, so for performance reasons the file system metadata is usually cached in memory anyway.

For these drives a company called US Design wrote a driver and intermediate layer that handles this. It's known as OSMS or OSDS depending which version you have and which drives / jukeboxes you have.

So, in order to use these drives you need to have that additional layered product software. As far as I can remember you should find the OSDS / OSMS software on the VAX layered product CDs. Install it, configure it and it should work.

Good luck.

Cheers, Colin (http://www.xdelta.co.uk).

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

Hoff — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:39:16 GMT

Look around for previous discussions of OSMS and OSDS and such -- Ask The Wizard should have a few discussions, for instance. Try variations on the following Google search:

"us design" site:h71000.www7.hp.com

DIGITAL retired the magneto-optical (MO) hardware and software, and transferred it all over to US Design over a decade or so ago. (IIRC, this dates back to DIGITAL days, and prior to Compaq and HP.)

Now most folks use DVD for this sort of RWZ-series task. The usual path for existing RWZ-series media involves migrating the data over to DVD or such, and scrapping the old hardware.

US Designs does offer (far) newer products in this product space, too -- and US Design is specifically partnering with HP for MO widgets, according to their web site...

http://www.usdesign.com/ProductOverview.html

The replacement software is the US Design OSS software package.