Closed mike632t closed 8 months ago
Note your own reference information:
When VMB determines that a controller is present, it searches in order of increas- ing unit number for a bootable unit with a removable volume. If it finds none, it will repeat the search for a nonremovable volume.
An RRD40 has removable media (a CDROM), hence it is behaving precisely as described.
Thank you Mark - the VMB it is actually smarter than I thought it was. I had expected it to treat all DUA type devices as (fixed) disks. (I never had a CDROM on a a MicroVAX II IRL).
The removable attribute is a detail of the specific drive type that the MSCP protocol passes to the simulated host system. Other removable drives are the several floppy types.
Thank you Mark - the VMB it is actually smarter than I thought it was. I had expected it to treat all DUA type devices as (fixed) disks. (I never had a CDROM on a a MicroVAX II IRL).
As Mark explains, that would in fact be wrong. While the fixed media may be most familiar, there are in fact a bunch of MSCP devices with removable media. Floppies of course, and CDROM, but also the RA60 -- a removable disk pack drive whose packs look a lot like RM03 packs but are quite a lot higher density.
On Sun, Feb 18, 2024 at 1:34 PM Paul Koning @.***> wrote:
Thank you Mark - the VMB it is actually smarter than I thought it was. I had expected it to treat all DUA type devices as (fixed) disks...
As Mark explains, that would in fact be wrong. While the fixed media may be most familiar, there are in fact a bunch of MSCP devices with removable media. Floppies of course, and CDROM, but also the RA60
And the RC25 (one platter/unit fixed, one removable), if any are still working, that is.
-ethan
I'm not sure if the following reference applies to the version of the MicroVAX II processor emulated by simh, but from memory (and it was a long time ago) I believe that the both MicroVAX II systems I used to look after behaved as described in Section 2.2.2 of the MicroVAX II 630QB Technical Manual (dated Nov 85) which says:
The following configuration script configures a MicroVAX II to have 16MB and and three disks DUA0 (RD54), DUA1 (RD53) and DUA3 (RRD40).
Starting simh confirms that the disks are attached correctly.
The output of the 'show version' and 'show config' commands is as follows:
Actual and expected behaviour
Based on the Technical Manual I'd expect the VMB to attempt to boot from DUA0, DUA1 and then DUA3, however although I have already installed ULTRIX on DUA0 the system appears to ignore DUA0 and boots from DUA3 instead (which restarts the installation process).
If I specify the boot device from the console prompt then the system boots from DUA0 as expected.