On 2013-05-17 21:22, Cory Smelosky wrote: On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2013-05-17 21:13, Cory Smelosky wrote: On Fri, 17 May 2013, Bob Armstrong wrote: Really? Not from tape? Interesting design choice... Old VAXes booted standalone BACKUP from the console media (TU58 or RX01). SA BACKUP then could talk to tape drives just fine. It's all you need to install VMS, so that was all they did. Ah right. Makes more sense how. How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy? The one time I did it, I actually hacked the boot loader into memory from the console, and started from there. The boot loader was listed in the manual. But (as I mentioned in another mail), this came from MtXinu. Not sure how other BSDs did it, as I never had an original distribution from any other. But once you had the system installed, you also created a console media which could boot the thing, as VMB was not able to boot a Unix system anyway, even from disk. Ahhh. That'd be why when I've installed 4.3BSD on the -11/780 simulator I needed an external executable to boot it. That sounds likely. Modern versions on VMB can boot Unix (like the version distributed with simh), but it still also requires that the system understand the information it gets passed by VMB. Doubt 4.3 understands that. NetBSD works fine with VMB. Even on the 11/780, now that we've identified that NetBSD wrote broken boot blocks for a long time, and that has been fixed. Johnny