steve@dartvax.UUCP (Steve Campbell) (06/28/85)
One of our 4.2BSD systems began life as a VAX750, cold loaded from the Berkeley distribution tapes. Then it became a 780, but the disks were the same, so no cold load was needed. Then it became a 785, and again the same disks were used (though a different boot floppy), so again no cold load. Last week after accidently corrupting those disks' root partitions, I tried to cold load the "miniroot" from those dusty 4.2 floppies and tapes. The stand-alone copy program complained of unexpected attention interrupts from the TU78, but copied the miniroot into the swap area anyway, and it booted fine. But when I tried using the miniroot to restore an "a" partition either from our dump tapes or from the 4.2 distribution tape (!), the restore would die after reading about half the files. The system would hang and drop the port access light on the disk (ra81). It was a dark hour. It turns out we also have Ultrix [TM Digital Equip. Corp.]. I tried the same procedure with their floppy and tape, and - lo! - it worked fine. No mt attention complaint and a successful restore. Thanks, guys. How come? Do old 4.2 distribution materials not work with 785's? If so, 785 folks could have a problem. Or could other devices now on the 785 - a DEUNA and an INCard - break the Berkeley miniroot? Anyone know? Steve Campbell dartvax!steve steve@Dartmouth.CSNET