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MicroVAX Drive list

Huntman616 said:
Yeah, I just double checked the drive J4 was set to drive terminator so I just changed it to motor start let’s see if it works
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Well, that didn’t work either, but here are some pictures of my system configuration, as well as the back of the optical drive
 

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So the hard drive still isn't showing up. The jumpers on the optical drive seem correct, but I haven't used an RRD43 before. Not sure what to tell you about the hard drive. Unless there is a cable issue. You could swap locations around temporarily to see if that changes anything.
 
Hey everybody, I like to thank everyone for the help. At this point I've tested all the connectors and still nothing. I don't know if it's because it's a third-party drive and not a digital drive or what the problem could be but I asked the person that I got it from months ago to see if they could refund the 40 or whatever dollars I paid for it see if I can find the relatively cheap digital brand hard drive seeing that they're still relatively expensive.
 
Huntman616 said:
Hey everybody, I like to thank everyone for the help. At this point I've tested all the connectors and still nothing. I don't know if it's because it's a third-party drive and not a digital drive or what the problem could be but I asked the person that I got it from months ago to see if they could refund the 40 or whatever dollars I paid for it see if I can find the relatively cheap digital brand hard drive seeing that they're still relatively expensive.
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The guy I got the drive from say it could have a Dos boot sector on it he had it in a Pentium III PC so he knows it works but I don't know if that would cause the problem or not even if it did, I don't have a way of wiping that drive.
 
Huntman616 said:
I did order a newer DEC hard drive it uses the 60 something pin connector compared to the 50 so I had to get an adapter. I don’t know if that could cause problems or if I just have it plugged into the wrong cable. But I’d have to open up the case when I get home, I remember the SCSI cables being labeled 1 2 3 etc.. I don’t know if those could be referring to the SCSI ids
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Be real careful about assumptions regarding that adapter! I recently spent most of a day trying to figure out why my Microvax 3100-10e was unable to see a 68-pin wide-SCSI drive with a similar adapter. Long story short, your adapter may be high-voltage differential to 68-pin. There is a standard for differential SCSI on a 50-pin cable and the signals do NOT show up on the same pins as 50-pin single-ended SCSI. Guess what my adapter turned out to be? Symptoms were exactly as you describe. I'm not 100% convinced that a 68-pin wide drive can work properly on a narrow bus under any circumstances, but at a minimum it would need the out-of-phase differential signals strapped in the appropriate direction with pull-up / pull-down resistors.
 
shirsch said:
Be real careful about assumptions regarding that adapter! I recently spent most of a day trying to figure out why my Microvax 3100-10e was unable to see a 68-pin wide-SCSI drive with a similar adapter. Long story short, your adapter may be high-voltage differential to 68-pin. There is a standard for differential SCSI on a 50-pin cable and the signals do NOT show up on the same pins as 50-pin single-ended SCSI. Guess what my adapter turned out to be? Symptoms were exactly as you describe. I'm not 100% convinced that a 68-pin wide drive can work properly on a narrow bus under any circumstances, but at a minimum it would need the out-of-phase differential signals strapped in the appropriate direction with pull-up / pull-down resistors.
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Yeah, I'm just gonna get an original RZ26-E 1.05GB 50 pin DEC drive (accidentally bought useing the wrong payment method and seeing if the person can cancel and refund the order to the wrong payment method so I can rebuy using the correct one) I should ask another question regarding VMS, because I was going to just install a modern version of netBSD, which supports my system still but someone said I could install VMS without a license and single user mode which I'm wondering how would I go about doing that?
 
The other option is to go for an 80-pin SCA interface drive and then get a 50 to 80 pin adapter card. I've used several of those in my MicroVAX 3100 M95 before switching entirely to ZuluSCSI SD card disk emulators.

This is the adapter card: https://www.ebay.com/itm/386601300605
There are a number of vendors. They are all basically the same.

These are example drives:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/235387320896 - The Seagate Cheetah ST318203LC are generally good drives. This one is 18GB which holds a LOT of VAX/VMS files.
 
reinhardtjh said:
The other option is to go for an 80-pin SCA interface drive and then get a 50 to 80 pin adapter card. I've used several of those in my MicroVAX 3100 M95 before switching entirely to ZuluSCSI SD card disk emulators.

This is the adapter card: https://www.ebay.com/itm/386601300605
There are a number of vendors. They are all basically the same.

These are example drives:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/235387320896 - The Seagate Cheetah ST318203LC are generally good drives. This one is 18GB which holds a LOT of VAX/VMS files.
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I actually might look at that SD Card thing I actually have in my compaq portable one (I’ll actually share the computer in the IBM clone section maybe one day that computer cost me at least $200 to fully restore ) a similar hard drive replacement because the hard card it came with was failing for a 40-year-old hard drive so I have a CF card hard drive in that computer computer. I never thought about SD card replacement until you mentioned it just now.
 
Well, I decided to bite the dust and buy an original digital equipment hard drive. I plugged it in and fired it up and well I’ll let the picture talk for itself. It took me a while to figure out the date and time stuff, but how do I get into the system without knowing the username and password is there a way to like single user into the system and change all that
 

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Well, never mind I can’t get it to boot again because every time I try the boot and open the show dev menu the hard drive size won’t show up and when I try to boot it well it gives me this error which I have no idea what it means. I don’t know if the drive will need to be reformatted and have everything reinstalled if so, I heard rumors you can install the vms. in single user without a license that I don’t know and I tried plugging it into different connectors on the cable. I just hope this hard drive I bought for $150 isn't bad because I feel stupid for spending $150 if it's bad.
 

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If you do get it to boot again and can get into the SYSTEM account using Hoff's method (It works, use it occasionally) then make sure to get a copy of the VMS licenses on the machine and save them. Do NOT reformat if you don't have to until you do that. You can use those license PAKs to run your system with any version of OpenVMS up to the last version - 7.3

I have to leave for work but I"ll look up the procedure in case you need it.
 
I just thought I would check in and still trying to figure out what that error means. I was able to find a VMS 7.3 install CD image. Unfortunately it's in IMG format in all the image burners for windows can't see it is a valid image.
 
Double, triple check all the connections for the disk and SCSI cable, but it's a bad sign the size doesn't show, that means when the MV queries the devices on the SCSI chain it's not returning all the data. On the other hand it does know it's at address 5 so something must be working.

The 7.3 install CD image is probably not in an IMG format. It's probably a byte by byte copy of the install CD which is a hybrid joliet CD format. If it's called <something>.IMG then try renaming it with a .ISO extension and see if Windows will write it. Not a Windows person so I don't know the tricks there.
 
Huntman616 said:
I just thought I would check in and still trying to figure out what that error means. I was able to find a VMS 7.3 install CD image. Unfortunately it's in IMG format in all the image burners for windows can't see it is a valid image.
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k3b on Linux has no problem writing the image to media. See if there's a way to override the complaint from your software?
 
Huntman616 said:
I just thought I would check in and still trying to figure out what that error means. I was able to find a VMS 7.3 install CD image. Unfortunately it's in IMG format in all the image burners for windows can't see it is a valid image.
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The problem is the file system is native VMS "Files 11" format not one one of the standard ones. I tend to use IMGBURN from https://www.imgburn.com/ but there are others.
 
Hey, thanks everybody for the advice I think the CDs I have that are blank are bad even though they're blank the burner says they're not so I might have to get a new set of cds
 
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