New kid on the block
The new Personal Workstation I obtained a few weeks ago didn’t boot properly. Whatever I tried, it kept booting into ARC – the (graphical) NT console. First of all, I assured I had the latest software – had to get it in ROM using the FAT formatted floppy disk, and choose to update the firmware. That didn’t show any errors so it may be assummed it worked.
Next came the question how to force it into SRM – the VMS /Unix console. It took some digging in the docs but I finally found it: Boot into ARC, hit F2 to enter setup, tab to CROM settings and hit F6 to get into the advanced mode – where the right console can be choosen, hit F10 twice, then Enter, and last Escape – and cycle power. (Is this the famous “intuitive” interface?)
But on reboot, ARC re-appeared and much to my surprise, the console was reset to be “NT (AlphaBIOS)”.
More surprising: ARC mentioned the machine to be a PWS 500a – where the front bezel clearly stated it to be a PWS 500au – the first will only run NT, and for VMS (and Unix) you need an au-type! But given the mentioning on the exteriour and the presence of the board containing the 2 Mb cache memory, it indeed looked like a au – type.
👿 What was going on here?
I put the question on the OpenVMS ITRC forum, and I got the answer within an hour: The battery might be dead. On second thought, that was feasable since ARC constantly mentioned the time was invalid and set to factory default (1-Jan-1995). Other settings were fine, though, and changes were persistent over boot. After replacing the battery (a cost of 4 eruo’s…) I could finally boot into SRM ( 😀 Hurray !!!!) and prepare for installation of OpenVMS. So the BIOS data may be split into flash-memory (keeping settings without power) and cells requireing battery backup. It’s the only reason I can think of, for this weird behavior
Next I installed OpenVMS 7.3-2 on the box, for the time being anyway, mainly to see what’s in the box: 256 Mb of memory (I know that already) and one (!) 4.1 Gb disk….Well, that will do for now.
Tomorrow, or this weekend, I’ll try to get it booted from the shared SCSI – the second SCSI controller is a KZPBA, though from a different type that is located in Diana: KZPBA-CX in stead of KZPBA-CY. It has already been set up to host on LUN 5 (the HSZ50 runs on LUN 7, the Diana host is set on 6, so 5 would be the right choice here.
The machine will be known as “Daphne” – and if possible, it will run clustered with Diana.