Some nice progress with hardware and Ultrix in the PUPS archive

[Michael Sokolov]

   Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
   
   Emanuel Stiebler has graciously provided me with a reference to a freely
downloadable copy of the Emulex QD21 manual. Using that manual, I have got
mine configured correctly and ran firmware diagnostics on it. It looks like
the Emulex card is OK, but for some reason it isn't seeing the drive
attached to it. Probably a defective drive reporting not ready or maybe
just a connection problem (the drive is mounted in some very weird way so
that I can't even check the connection, let alone see the jumpers or
anything). Oh well, I'll figure it out later. Right now i have the WQESD
controller configured as the primary one, and it has 4 working 320 MB disks
attached to it, so it should be enough for me to build and release 4.3BSD-
Quasijarus1.
   
   But there is something even more interesting. I got the TK50 to work!
Yay! It turned out that one of the TQK50 boards was working after all, it
was simply being screwed up by the rest of the system standing on its ears.
   
   After I got the VAX to boot from some VMSish tape I have (it boots, asks
for date and time, prints something about some "standalone backup" and
gives me a "$" prompt, but I'm absolutely NULL in VMS, so this doesn't do
me much good), I realized that I couldn't boot from my Ultrix tapes because
there is something wrong with the way I wrote them. I wrote them on a TZ30
(half-height native-SCSI TK50 clone) connected to a 386 with an Adaptec
1520A running FreeBSD booted from a floppy (the 386's big ESDI hard disk is
filled with DOS stuff only). In fact, when I tried reading that tape back
on this very same FreeBSD thing it didn't read! Something is clearly wrong.
   
   As I was thinking about how else can I get correctly written Ultrix
tapes, the following idea sneaked into my mind. The PUPS archive already
contains PDP-11 Ultrix. How about VAX Ultrix? With Warren's permission, I
would be more than happy to upload my VAX Ultrix tape images (I have them
sitting as files on my DOS disk). Once that is done, would someone
volunteer to download them, write them to two TK50 cartridges, and send
them to me? TIA for any help.
   
   Sincerely,
   Michael Sokolov
   Cellular phone: 216-217-2579
   ARPA Internet SMTP mail: msokolov at harrier.Uznet.NET