Installing ULTRIX WS 2.0 on a DS3100
bryan at GOMEZ.phys.virginia.edu
bryan at GOMEZ.phys.virginia.edu
Thu Oct 11 04:36:25 AEST 1990
Hi folks,
We recently purchased a DECstation 3100, and soon thereafter
corrupted its system disk while fiddling with the swap space. We have a
complete backup, so it shouldn't be a big problem to go back to the
configuration we had before. We'd planned to do this by booting a
standalone system from tape, then either re-installing the original
ULTRIX distribution and restoring from the backup tape, or using the
standalone 'restore' to just restore the root directory from the
backup tape.
Unfortunately, the only standalone ULTRIX tape we have available
is an ancient version 2.0 (specifically, ULTRIX WS V2.0 SUPPORTED,
AQ-MM11A-BE), and it doesn't seem to work. The standalone system boots,
and we can perform the patch semi-described in the ULTRIX release notes
for version 3.1D/UWS 2.2D (page A-3), in which we edit install.1 and
change 'root_D=$2' to 'root_D=RD54'. (I'm told this is necessary for
RZ56 disks because the installation software doesn't have partition
tables for the RZ56.) Re-starting the installation procedure, and
choosing the item 'BASIC INSTALLATION' from the resulting menu, we see
a message indicating that 'mkfs' has successfully created the root
file system on partition 'a' of the disk, then we get a string of error
messages like the following:
TK50 unit 5: receive diagnostics command failed.
TK50 unit# 5: offline
TK50 unit# 5: offline
read after eom failed: no such device or address.
.
.
.
(repeats ad infinitum)
This seems to result from the installation procedure's calling 'restore',
since we see the same messages when we try to do a restore by hand.
Some notes:
1. The TK50 *is* unit 5, and it *is* online. This is the drive which
was successfully addressed only minutes before, when the standalone
system was booted from it.
2. We've tried replacing this TK50 with another, identical, TK50 and
we see the same results.
3. We've tried talking to the tape drive, using the 'mt' command
in the standalone system, and mt can't talk to the drive either.
'mt status' results in:
TK50 unit 5: receive diagnostics command failed.
TK50 tape drive: residual = 0
ds = 0
er = 0
4. Looking in /dev, we find that the proper device special files are
there. Deleting these and re-creating them has no effect.
and finally, the coup de grace:
5. We've booted an identical (working) system with the same tape, and
found that it, too, can't talk to the local tape drive after booting.
We're baffled, and the local DECpeople are baffled. It's possible
that we may be able to lay hands on a later distribution tape eventually, but
for the moment we're stuck with this one. (The system was originally installed
with an 'ULTRIX 32 v3.1D' tape, borrowed from another institution.) Can
anyone suggest a patch for the problem we're seeing?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Bryan.
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Bryan K. Wright ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| University of Virginia Physics Department |
| (804) 924-6814 Office, (804) 293-7267 Home |
| Internet: Bryan at gomez.phys.Virginia.EDU, Bitnet: bkw1a at Virginia.EDU |
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| "If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste |
| much more like prunes than rhubarb does." -- Groucho |
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