pung@ornl-ncc ("M. S. Pung") (01/11/88)
Hi, The following attached message describes a problem that was discovered recently at our site. I thought I would pass it on to the net. Has anyone seen this problem at their site or know a work around to it ??? Note that I have not tested out what the user site suggests in the following message, so I do not know if it works or not.... One note, the folks at Colorado mentioned the fact that the problem may be fixed in V4.7, but if the problem is really in VMB.EXE, I dont see how a VMS upgrade will fix it since VMB.EXE resides on the PRO 380 console hard disk..??? Thanks in advance to all who reply. |------------------------------------------------------------------| | Mike Pung | (615) 574-8082 | | Oak Ridge National Lab | Pung%ornl-knsms@ornl-msr.arpa | | Martin Marietta Energy Systems | 128.219.128.10 | |------------------------------------------------------------------| I N T E R O F F I C E M E M O R A N D U M Date: 6-Jan-1988 02:15pm EST Subject: VAX 8700/8550 Memory BUG ** Notice ** A problem occurs when attempting to boot a VAX 8550/8700/8800 series computer with exactly 96 megabytes of memory. Listed below are the error messages that result when attempting to boot a system configured with the "magic" amount of memory. Interesting of note is the fact that that VAX 8550 and VAX 8700 produce different error messages. Note that the problem only occurs if you attempt to boot with exactly 96 megabytes of memory, the problem does not occur for example if you boot with 80 megabytes or 128 megabytes. On a VAX 8550, the error message displayed is the following: "SYSBOOT-E-IOERROR, I/O error reading DUDRIVER.EXE" On a VAX 8700, the error message displayed is the following: "SYSTEM-F-MACHINECHECK, Unexpeted Machine Check" After calling the DEC Software Support Center, the response was that this was a known problem and that it already had been reported by many sites. They said that it was a problem in VMB.EXE but that it was not known exactly what the problem is or how to fix it. They said it may be fixed in V4.7 but then again maybe not... There was one fix suggested by a user site as something that may get around the problem. Set the PHYSICALPAGES sysgen parameter to the value 195584, and supposedly this will allow the system to boot with 96 megabytes of memory; however only 95.5 megabytes are mapped by VAX/VMS. Note that this is not a DEC patch but something that was tried and suggested by an end user site. Mike Pung ------
RAY@CRVAX.SRI.COM (Ramon M. Curiel) (01/14/88)
Version 4.7 includes a new copy of the VMB.EXE to fix at least part of these problems. The release notes allude to problems on the 8700 and 8500 having problems of this type. Ray