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HP3000 A500 MPE/iX Only?

audiocrush

Member
Joined
Jul 21, 2023
Messages
30
Hi,
I'm wondering... The HP3000 A500 and the HP9000 A500 look pretty much identical to me except that the HP9000 front bezel is beige and the HP3000 is kind of dark greyish colored.
HP3000 appears to be MPE/iX only and HP9000 seems to be HP-UX/Linux.
Is there any technicalities that would prevent me from installing HP-UX on a HP3000 A500?
Or has anyone ever tried?
I mean currently my HP3000 is without OS anyways...
Would it even boot from a HP-UX 11iv2 DVD?
 
MPE XL later MPE/iX was/is the "protected" product that won't boot on HP9000 unless suitable changes are made to "stable storage" on the processor board. HP3000 will almost certainly boot HP-UX for the corresponding model of HP9000.
 
Awesome!
I just got around to trying it.
It really boots from a HP-UX11iv2 DVD I just downloaded from archive.org
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to like the LSI diff SCSI Controller the previous owner used for the HP autoraid box.
There are no internal disks in the system and the setup menu reports 0 disks found during IO scan.
Is HP-UX known to be picky about those things?
Is there maybe machine-specific versions of HP-UX?
I think HP-UX11i should be the most age appropriate to my system.
 
I don't know the A-series. Have got a 3000/937 that I should finish fixing, early 1990s design with a 50-conductor SCSI bus inside.
 
Is that also a machine that has a HP9000 equivalent or did they go with completely different designs at that time?
 
Sorry for the double post but I seem to be unable to edit my previous message.
I was actually able to install HP-UX 11iv2 on it!
I found a SCSI SCA HDD that I could plug into the system because apparently HP-UX doesn't like the SCSI adapter that is used in my HP3000 A500 to interface the HP Autoraid Box that was originally attached to it.
After roughly 4 hours of screwing around with the terminal because it doesn't like the graphical interface of the HP-UX setup, I managed to install it from 2 DVDs.
So I answered my own question :D
It works! Awesome :)
I also have a HP visualize FX10 pro on order to try and see if I can make a HP3000 Visualize Frankenstation out of it :D
 
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