See below.
William Donzelli wrote:
<snip>
The 4331-2 disk is mostly readable - it gets a check halfway thru the
load, and the previous owner devised a complicated song-and-dance act
that one needs to do to get past the problem. It works, but is just
itching to get worse over time. I do not have a similar song-and-dance
for the 3830, so if that gets troublesome, things will be bad.
It seems to me that each set of IPL floppies was tied to a specific
machine, serial number, features, and all. Using disks from other
machines would not work. Is this true?
For the 4331, I have no idea. I worked on large systems, not the
medium-size ones, and even on the large ones (158, 168, 303x--can't
recall whether the latter even had a 23FD or 33FD, actually) I never had
both floppies go bad at the same time so I never tried it.
As I recall, the 3830 disks could be interchanged if the features and
non-microcode EC levels on the boxes were the same. Doing so was "not
supported" but there was little to lose and when an appropriate disk
could be found it beat telling a customer the machine would stay down
until a new floppy disk could be flown in from California if the backup
was missing or unreadable. It would be worth trying on the 4331.
There's nothing to lose.
This 4331-2 ran its last job only about a month ago (it never had a CE
call, either!), and the owner, a small midwest service bureau,
apparently powered the system down just about every weekend to save
electricity. That's a lot of IPLs for these poor floppies!
No calls ever for 20-something years? Wow! That's quite a testament to
the job those guys did on the hardware side. (One of the hardware guys
told me a few days ago he'd stopped tracking MBTF projections because
the numbers were just so high they weren't worth remembering any more.)
Now, if we could ever get to the point where we went 20 years without a
*software* defect...mumble, mumble...
<snip>
--
John Eells
z/OS Technical Marketing
IBM Poughkeepsie
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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