On Sunday, October 9, 2016 at 4:58 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: > Oh, and another comment. More general, but anyway... > > DEC did not really expect that tapes would be booted from on VAXen, so they > did not provide any standard way to boot in this way. For the > VAX-11/780 for example, if you got VMS on tape, you were expected to boot > a small standalone version of BACKUP from floppies, and then do the restore > of the tape from this environment. > > The VAX-11/750 had a similar thing with the standalong backup environment > on DECtape II. > > However, MicroVAXen reintroduced booting from tape, as the TK50 became > widespread, and the only removable storage on many of those machines. (I > say reintroduced, since PDP-11s usually always included the ability to boot > from tape.) > > So the approach of not being able to boot from tape, that DEC decided on for > the early VAXen, is a bit unfortunate, since it does make these kind of things > extra hard, if you are not using VMS. > > And this is why doc sets like MtXinu provided this information in their > manuals, and why the instructions consist of writing actual code into memory > to do the booting from tape.
As I vaguely recall, MtXinu didn't come into existence until after 4.x BSD Unix and when that happened, the VAX 11/750 certainly was a supported system. Meanwhile, Ray's original question was about installing 3BSD, which I think may have existed before the VAX 11/750 was available/supported... Of course, my memory is vague at best. In any case, the installation instructions for the original OS distribution would be the relevant place to look. - Mark _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
