lrr@zti1.UUCP (Lawrence R Rogers) (02/06/84)
For the last week, I have been trying madly to install UNIX 4.1c on a VAX-11/780 at Siemens AG in Munich, West Germany. I did this same job in November, 1983, on the same machine no less, and was successful then. I'd like to know if anyone else has run into wild problems with a VAX and the UDA50. Here's the hardware configuration: VAX-11/780 4 Mb memory (64K chips) 2 TU78 1 UDA50 with 3 RA81 on UBA0 6 DMF32 - 2 on UBA0 4 on UBA1 1 DMR11 on UBA0 1 DPU11 on UBA0 (I know it's not supported, but it's hold-over from the days of VMS on this machine) The system gets hard errors and SDI errors. On diagnosis (evrla - run over an entire week-end), I only get correctable ecc errors on blocks in the last cylinder. I talked with DEC in Merrimack, NH, about potential bugs in the UDA50 driver, and posted the ones they told me about. I realize that I could have done that wrong, but I don't think so (hopefully). I've literally done everything with this machine - including running micro diagnostics, UBA diagnostics, and the like. Still, I get this hard errors and SDI errors. For the sake of my own sanity, which is waining after sticking my head inside of a VAX for 6 days, I'd like to know if other folks have had any similar troubles - and hopefully how you solved them. Also, I run into trouble on this machine with the floopy boot program - it just seems to spin in a tight loop, waiting for the UDA50 to tell it something. Repeated re-executions of the same boot produce the same result. The fix - power down memory and the DC power. When powered up again, everything is allright. I used to think I understood this stuff, but now I am quite perplexed. Comments from anyone greatly appreciated. My real mailing address is: ...!princeton!siemens!lrr I'm just in Germany, drinking the beer! I wonder if the problem has to do with the 220V/50 Cycle AC they have over here. Probably not. P.S. - VMS ran on this machine in the time between when I installed UNIX in November and now (February). I know these UDA50/RA81 combinations are quite intelligent - do you think that the drive is retaining some information from its VMS days and won't let me override that info? That's a shot in the dark, but I thought I heard something once about UDA50/RA81s remembering the status of open files across reboots/power shutdowns. What's the solution? P.S.S. - Thanks to the folks at DEC who offered the software solutions - I'm sure they were correct, but they didn't solve whatever problem I have with this machine. P.S.S.S. - I have Fujitsu Eagles on my system in Princeton - to those of you considering Eagles and RA81 - go with the Eagles.