OpenVMS Alpha V 6.2 Bootable CD

[monish_1]

Dear All,
I need a bootable CD for my DIGITAL Aplha 255/233 (ALPHAst).

I am using OpenVMS Alpha V 6.2-1H3

Please send me details, how to get Alpha Foundation Bootable CD or any source to
download files

Regards,

Sham

[Bob Blunt]

Sham, where, generally, are you located and do you know any others who have Alphas running OpenVMS in your area?

Are you intending to reload the operating system or do you need the CD to use, for example, it's BACKUP utility to save and compress disk(s) on your workstation?

Generally speaking the *official* solution would be to contact sales or your field service engineer and ask if they can help. The more practical solution is borrowing a bootable CD from someone more local. If you're not limited to V6.3-1H3 because you need to reload the operating system onto the disk then any O/S distribution CD would be good enough from V6.2-1H3 up through V8.3 or V8.4. It all depends on what you need to do.

Of course if this is your personal system at home then the answers are somewhat different. Unless you have a great friend in sales, support or another VMS user that *just* happens to have a set of the O/S distribution laying around, you're going to have a tough time. I remember V6.2-1H3 as being one of the more difficult CDs to find because it was really a hardware-specific release that just happens to run fine on (most) other hardware from the same era. That's why "what do you need to do" is important. It'd be somewhat easier to find a CD that boots into V7.3 IF you're not reloading.

bob

[monish_1]

Very Thanks Bob

I am from Bahrain.
My company still using the Alpha Station & I have to support around 6-8 months again.
Problem is I had a set of bootable CD's but at present all are not working. (Not able to boot at >>> prompt)
To restore image backup, I need bootable CD.
So, is there any internet source, where I could download files & make a CD.
Is there any another way to make a bootable CD.
Waiting for your favourable reply.

Regards,

Sham

[Joseph Huber_1]

>>So, is there any internet source, where I could download files & make a CD.
Is there any another way to make a bootable CD.

Definitely no, not even patches are downloadable, unless You have a service contract.

And You have no bootable VMS system on any of the hard-disks ? An image restore can be done uising any other VMS booted from hard-disk, it need not be booted from CD.

[Jan van den Ende]

Sham,

Joseph wrote:
>>>

And You have no bootable VMS system on any of the hard-disks ? An image restore can be done uising any other VMS booted from hard-disk, it need not be booted from CD.
<<<
In addition, it need not be 6.2-1H3 to boot just to do a restore.
ANY sufficient version (not sure if for your hardware that might be 6.2 or 6.1, but certainly any higher will do) can be used to run BACKUP.

Success.

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Jan van den Ende]

monish (Sham),

from your Forum Profile:


I have assigned points to 0 of 19 responses to my questions.


Maybe you can find some time to do some assigning?

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/helptips.do?#33

Mind, I do NOT say you necessarily need to give lots of points. It is fully up to _YOU_ to decide how many. If you consider an answer is not deserving any points, you can also assign 0 ( = zero ) points, and then that answer will no longer be counted as unassigned.
Consider, that every poster took at least the trouble of posting for you!

To easily find your streams with unassigned points, click your own name somewhere.
This will bring up your profile.
Near the bottom of that page, under the caption "My Question(s)" you will find "questions or topics with unassigned points " Clicking that will give all, and only, your questions that still have unassigned postings.
If you have closed some of those streams, you must "Reopen" them to "Submit points". (After which you can "Close" again)

Do not forget to explicitly activate "Submit points", or your effort gets lost again!!

Thanks on behalf of your Forum colleagues.

PS. - nothing personal in this. I try to post it to everyone with this kind of assignment ratio in this forum. If you have received a posting like this before - please do not take offence - none is intended!

PPS. - Zero points for this.

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[RBrown_1]

You have a "set of bootable CDs"? And none of them boot?

A couple of things come to mind.

1. Hardware: If I had a bunch of CDs that used to boot and don't anymore, I might start to wonder if there is something wrong with the drive or the system rather than the CDs.

2. What is a "set" of bootable CDs? If you have a bunch of bootable CDs from different distribution kits, then I could go along with that. But if you received a single VMS distribution kit or perhaps the CONDIST or SPL, then I think there is probably only one bootable CD in the set. That CD would be called something like ALPHA062.

hth

[Andy Bustamante]

As pointed out, you can restore a system disk on another server and move the disk. You're also not limited to VMS 6.2-1h3, any later Alphaserver boot CD will allow you to restore an image backup.

If the CDs you have don't boot, I would suspect a hardware issue. What disks do you have installed? Are you daisy chaining any scsi devices on the same controller as the CD drive? Post the output of

>>> show device

I once had a terminator in a scsi shelf go bad, the internal CD drive was on the same controller and everything was fine until I wanted to boot from CD for an operating system upgrade.

[Bob Blunt]

If the system is bootable or running then load the bootable CD into the reader and try to $ MOUNT it. If you have another system running OpenVMS with a CD reader you could try the CD there. I'd be surprised if they mounted on the AlphaStation correctly. If they work on another system I'd definitely call for hardware intervention to swap the CD reader on the AS255.

bob

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] I had a set of bootable CD's but at
> present all are not working. (Not able to
> boot at >>> prompt)

What, exactly, are these "bootable CD's"?

"Not able to" is not a useful problem
description. It does not say what you did.
It does not say what happened when you did
it. As usual, showing actual commands with
their actual output can be more helpful than
vague descriptions or interpretations.

If you really need to download a VMS
installation CD-ROM image, then you might try
asking at comp.os.vms. Some people may be
willing to help, but unwilling to offer to
violate a copyright in a forum run by the
copyright owner.

[Art Wiens]

I would suggest you try contacting your "local" HP office ... I have no idea if they are anywhere in your "neighborhood", but there is a location listed in Bahrain:

http://h10134.www1.hp.com/contacts/locations/bahrain/?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

You never know, there might be some hardcore VMS field guy there who has a collection of cd's.

Other than that, I would also tend to wonder whether my rom drive was working if none boot. Can you mount any of these cd's while VMS is running? $ MOUNT/OVER=ID DKAxxx: . Again, barring any other local resources, that HP office _might_ be able to help with some form of hardware support.

What application do you have running on a VMS workstation stuck in circa ~1995? Not judging, just curious.

Good luck,
Art

[tsgdavid]

If you have a problem with your CD device, this will not solve that problem but...

If you have more than one hard drive on your system, you can load a minimal version of VMS on another disk (other than your system disk). You can then boot from this other disk to restore your original system disk - no need for a CD at all.

To make an existing disk bootable, just type @SYS$SYSTEM:AXPVMS$PCSI_INSTALL_MIN.COM from a privileged user account.

Dave Williams