Installing new optical drive

[bbetts]

Hi

My knowledge in VMS is pretty limited, so I was hoping someone here could give me a hand with this.

I recently recieved a RWZ52 Optical SCSI Drive that I need to use for my VAX. We are running a VAX 4000/100 with VMS 5.5-2.

I shutdown and halted the system, connected my new optical drive and at the unbooted command prompt (>>>) checked to see if it showed up (SHOW DEV). It showed up in the unbooted command prompt as *ka200 (rwz52), which is the correct SCSI ID, but I think the * means it doesn't know what kind of device it is.

I then booted my system and checked to see if the optical drive was there, but it was not. It would seem that it is detected from the unbooted command prompt, but not from the booted one. Is there something I need to do to configure/install the drive first?

Please advise, thanks.

Brad

[Andreas Fassl]

Brad,

which drives are usually attached? Have you checked to change the ID of the RWZ52 to something higher (4) and then to test again?
Is the drive in DEC mode (please see attached manual)?

Regards

Andreas

[Robert Gezelter]

Brad,

A quick note, and a reference to Hoff's comment on the parallel inquiry in the OpenVMS.org fora.

The console SHOW DEV command uses a generic sequence to produce the Device IDs. This is a far cry from the details of driving the device to do real data transfer and management operations. It is, however, a very stable subset of the SCSI command set, so it is excellent for firmware producing a list of devices on a bus.

For other interested parties, Hoff (from Engineering) posted a comment on Brett's question about the RWZ52 drives at http://www.openvms.org/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=1398&t=1393.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[Thomas Schick]

Brad, the RWZ52 User's Guide (Apr-1994) mentioned it as supported: on VAX with VMS V5.4-3 or higher, "direct SCSI host adapter access" and OSDS/OSMS. For OSxS you need PERCEPTICS PAK.

[bbetts]

I wasn't aware that these forums and the openvms.org forums were commonly cross referenced, otherwise I would have never posted in both.

It was a pretty simple solution (that I was completely unaware of at the time of posting). I just used the CONNECT command from sysgen and it installed the device drivers properly.

Works fine.

Thanks for the advice though!

[Ian Miller.]

"I wasn't aware that these forums and the openvms.org forums were commonly cross referenced," - there are some people who answer questions in both. Stephen Hoffman answers VMS questions everwhere!