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Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

 
khanh ha
New Member

DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

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
4 REPLIES 4
Volker Halle
Honored Contributor

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

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.
khanh ha
New Member

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

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
Colin Butcher
Esteemed Contributor

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

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).
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (Occam's razor).
Hoff
Honored Contributor

Re: DEC RWZ52 optical drive installation

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.