Help booting a 2400Turbo from tape.

George Hartzell hartzell at boulder.colorado.edu
Wed Oct 4 09:13:38 AEST 1989


I haver recently been called on to try to resuscitate an IRIS
2400Turbo that has (once again) munched its disks.  I used to be
primary care provider for this machine when it was a lowly IRIS 2400.
While I was caring for it I made several (3) bootable tapes, and used
them several times to rebuild the machine from scratch.  The sequence
went something like:
	
	tb mdfex 	( to boot the md formatter/exerciser)
	Z		( enter a security password)
	xxxxx		( stupid password :))
	t		( tape to disk copy)
	2		( second file on tape)
	0		( md 0)
	g		( partition g, the boot area)
	go		( do it)

	t		( tape to disk copy)
	3		( third file on tape)
	0		( md 0)
	a		( partition a, the root partition)
	go		( do it)


When I tried to go through this sequence on the now upgraded machine,
I found that it seems to have a new monitor.  The command that loads
mdfex from the bootable tape seems to be:

	b ct.0:mdfex

The password stuff still works.

When I went to use the "t20ggo" sequence it reported copying 0 blocks
to md0g.  This worried me, but I continued on.  The "t20ago" sequence
reported copying some larger number of blocks, and actually printed a
sequence of "5 10 15 ... 40" as it worked.  Now when I tried to boot
the machine, using the good old "b<cr>" it informed me that it
couldn't find "defaultboot".  It seems that the "t20ggo" not only
didn't copy anything, but actually zapped what used to be there.

The OS that we have been running is apparently GL2/W3.5.  There are
roms on the cpu board labelled IP2/3.0.7, and most of the labelled
chips have some label on them which reads IP2something.  

So, I have two questions.

	1.  Are my old (3.5 from an IRIS 2400) bootable tapes any
	    good?  If so, can someone tell me what has changed about
	    the rebuilding procedure.

	2.  If I need a new bootable tape, can someone out there help
	    me?  (oh yeah, did I mention that the machine *isn't*
	    under maintenance...).  It seems that there shouldn't be
	    a licensing problem, since we own the machine and the
	    system, our problem is just that the dealer who we bought
	    it from didn't bother to give us the tools that we need to
	    solve such problems, and the people who were maintaining
	    the machine weren't informed of the need for a set of
	    bootable tapes.

If you reply to this via e-mail, please also send a copy to 
marvil at boulder.colorado.edu, since she is the most heavily impacted
user, and would like to keep up with what is happening.  I will be out
of town until Thurs, 10-12-89, but someone will be watching this
newsgroup for me.

THANKS.
g.

George Hartzell			                  (303) 492-4535
 MCD Biology, University of Colorado-Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309
hartzell at Boulder.Colorado.EDU  ..!{ncar,nbires}!boulder!hartzell



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