ggj@doc.ic.ac.uk (Graham Johnson) (08/03/90)
[usual disclaimer about not really knowing what newsgroup was best, please don't shoot me etc etc - please suggest a better one] A nice friendly company just gave us a MicroVAX II system for free - it being surplus to requirements to the extent that it was still in the crate it was shipped to an exhibition in ages ago (the software on it expired in 1988!). It turns out that it is a MicroVAX II running Ultrix-32m v1.2 (!) with a interesting disc thingy in another box labelled "US Design VIP". I don't have any docs for the thing and wouldn't be surprised if the company concerned didn't either. I managed to work out that is was a pretty smart thing with 4 159Mb discs in it that could be turned into logical discs in just about any configuration I might want. All very well. It WAS fine and I have no desire to reconfig it. UNFORTUNATELY it has come up with a couple of hard errors and I just don't know how to lose them. I had a nose into the diagnostics port and that didn't help too much. I reckon I could replace the presumably bad blocks if only I could find the things (I only have the "sn"). I could even format the disc I guess but I am reluctant to do anything that might mess up the configuration. I wouldn't even know what to tell "newfs" to do afterwards :-) Can anyone help me out with this one? The system could be quite useful to us if I could get it going properly. Might perhaps be best to e-mail replies to me, though I will try to read the news group (with my luck any articles would come and go while I'm on leave). Thanks for any assistance, Cheers, Graham