It may not be easy finding a 2.88 for laptops, or some good soul made them ? On 2/12/13, Kari Uusim ki <uusimaki at exdecfinland.org> wrote: The Multia floppy drive is indeed similar to ones used on laptops. The Personal Workstations (PWS 433au, 500au and 600au) came with two different IDE chipsets. One is supported with VMS, the other isn't. Therefore you don't know if the IDE devices work with VMS unless you open the case and look at the chips or run "show config" from the SRM. That's why Tru64 or WNT works on any PWS. Kari On 12.2.2013 10:13, Dan B wrote: no, the server one is the same of the miata and the noname, (and probably the rs6000 ibm as well) the multia ises a funny ribbon cable like the laptops and the macs, hopefully a laptop drive may work ? the toshiba are ide or scsi ? i found out those multia can use both (bummer,) but i doubt the ide may work for vms, on the miata (that "came from the factory" with an ide cd,) i had to use an external scsi for vms, would not see the original one, but would work just fine with true64 and win2000, ... maybe because it was born as an "au" for unix, mistery ;-) On 2/12/13, hvlems at zonnet.nl <hvlems at zonnet.nl> wrote: What kind of floppy drive does the Multia have? Is it similar to what is used in, say, an AlphaServer 1200? -----Original Message----- From: Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 23:51:11 To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue I think I'll just take that drive out, whatever it is, it may help cooling. I'm more worried about a replacement floppy to be honest, I like to have spare parts for everything, since finding them may be a nightmare at times. On 2/11/13, Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: @hvlems at zonnet.nl - Did you write IDE disk for a Multia? ISTR it used a 2.5" scsi drive. I thought it was, LOL, is a half size 2", guess I guessed wrong, the flat cable gave me the impression. I never did anything with that drive except using the NT 3.51 that was on it originally (upgraded later to 4.0,) I have better read the documentation before I try to "fix" it LOL. I think NT should run on SCSI, I had a WIN2000 beta running on the miata a very long time ago, but the disk went bad, and don't know where to find a CD for it. In the mid ni8neties we ran a lot of NT 3.51 and 4 on alpha, but honestly, don't remember the hardware, has been a long time (for a senile guy like me.) On 2/11/13, Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: I think I'll take the ide out, after imoaging it (hopefully,) would you know of a way of using a 2.88 non dec floppy in there ? adapters from the flat cable to the generic floppy one ? I'm wandering if I can use a regular alpha one or an ibm rs6000 one, have a few spares, just don't know if vms and the firmware may support it. On 2/11/13, Kari Uusim ki <uusimaki at exdecfinland.org> wrote: There were several options; a 2,5" SCSI disk, a 3,5" SCSI disk and a 2,5" IDE disk. What I've found out with my Multias is that it is not recommended to use an internal drive at all, because of the additional heat it produces. The enclosure is not very well designed for sufficient cooling and therefore it is best to try to minimize the heat load in every possible way. An external SCSI disk or enclosure with disks (such as a BA353) works fine. Kari On 11.2.2013 10:20, hvlems at zonnet.nl wrote: Did you write IDE disk for a Multia? ISTR it used a 2.5" scsi drive. -----Original Message----- From: Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:03:10 To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue also, for the drive, let the machine off but plugged into a socket for 24 hours, maybe needs to energize, I notice today with the multia, and before with the vax, that they need enough charge on the batteries to function anyhow, that's how the isa corrupted message went off after a while, so that issue is solved, not so for the ide hard disk, that one i think is fried, still keeps appearing and disappearing On 2/10/13, Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: I have been using barracuda plain scsi-1, external, they are small but run decent for everything (probably except windoze, never tried to run it on scsi on alpha.) All three were barracuda, I lost one machine (the miata, without counting a number of VAX, those have been dying faster, I'm down to "one" now,) but not the drives. The noise points to a bad drive, (hopefully not controller,) on linux boxes, pc and pc server hardware, I have had a lot of disk failures, sparc, sgi, hp9000 and ibm 6000 are built way better, hardly never fail, consider that those alpha (and the small drives they came with,) are now going to be 20 year old in a few months, the VAX is heading for thirty, in so I expect those old drives to fail sooner or later, I used to buy them by the lot, and still have boxes of small ones. I'm more worried when the machines fail, those are hard to replace, and parts may be really hard to find (like a multia floppy or internal ide.) Probably is time to image all those drives, and if worse comes to worse, run on stromasys or simh for the vax. cheers, daniel ;-) On 2/10/13, Michael Holmes <mholmes10 at hotmail.com> wrote: Found the hidden culprit.... The hard drive started making noises that I normally hear from a blender. The multia booted fine when I set it to mop boot without any local disk (slow but worked). So next weekend I'll remove (or replace )the drive and do the fan upgrade everyone recommends. Anyone know of any possible replacement scsi drives for multia's??? Mike Sent from my iPhone On Feb 10, 2013, at 8:39 PM, "Dan B" <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: keep it in a cold place, the number one cause of death for multia is processor overheating, it does not suffer cold, but fries processors in the heat On 2/10/13, Michael Holmes <mholmes10 at hotmail.com> wrote: Oh gee what a picky machine.... It wasn't lighting up the flat panel monitor from SRM console. Switched it to the same old CRT monitor I use with the DEC 3000 (only monitor with RGB inputs) and its displaying... Damn thing is ACTUALLY booting off its little disk that I installed vms on directly via the DEC 3000. Now just have to convo boot the damn thing to fix its HOME server for system disks (node name and addresses changed when I connected to HECnet). wish me luck... Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:42:08 +0200 From: uusimaki at exdecfinland.org To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue Are you sure that nothing has changed on your setup since you booted the Multia successfully? Any parameter? Anything of the HW? On 10.2.2013 21:01, Michael Holmes wrote: Yes I hooked up the vms install CDROM to the multia to boot and used the boot procedure with floppy and it pretty much stalls after the "starting bootstrap ..."message. took the HD from the dec3000 with the image of the vms install disk and tried to boot from it with same results. Bought a new (and expensive) floppy for it and same results. Can flip to ARC and SRM consoles ok (not tried to boot under arc as I don't have win nt.) --------- Just booted back up and it was at ARC console so I switched it over to SRM and power cycled it and now it's not powering the monitor. Will have to find my serial cable and try to switch it. Sent from my iPhone On Feb 10, 2013, at 4:06 AM, "Kari Uusim ki" <uusimaki at exdecfinland.org> wrote: Do you have any chance to test booting from a directly connected SCSI CD-ROM or a disk? Kari On 10.2.2013 0:58, Michael Holmes wrote: Forgive me if this is off topic, but I was reading about the fixes to the VAXStation 4000 regarding chips. I bought a multia several years back and I think it sucommed to being moved to and from Germany and the States too many times. I had it booting as a satelite off a DEC 3000 just fine, until this last move. I thought the battery had died and replaced it. (dead battery prevents the bios from coming up) I get the SRM console and i'd get MOP load message on the DEC 3000 but the MULTIA just hangs after message about bootstrapping. I heard something about an I/O chip that can go bad on the MB and was wondering if anyone had any ideas that could be used to fix the MULTIA. thanks Mike .