Re: Installing OpenVMS from USB

Christopher wrote:
I have some OpenVMS media on DVD, but I have one of the CD-less
rx2600's. Instead of dropping $60 on a DVD drive, I was wondering
about installing off of USB media. Whether that is a flash drive or
external HDD.

I notice that the EFI firmware seems to be able to read FAT
filesystems off this kind of media. In fact, EFI reminds me of an
advanced DOS shell, actually.

In any case, I am trying to copy the OpenVMS DVD media to the USB
drive. However, I can't seem to mount it under Linux. Any idea what
format the media is actually in? I tried iso9660, obviously.

The OpenVMS I64 distribution DVD format is a hybrid ISO-9660:1988 strict with the El Torito extensions, and the bootable portion of the volume structure involves an ODS-2 (or ODS-5, I haven't looked at that detail of the distribution DVD that carefully) overlayment. It's a hybrid disk volume structure.

Standard non-optical disk bootstrap on OpenVMS I64 uses a hybrid of a three, four or five partition GPT disk, and one or two FAT partitions, and the GPT, with an ODS-2 or ODS-5 overlayment. AFAIK, the MBR partitioning wasn't supported by HP, but it used to work. I also haven't tried MBR lately, and I'd not expect HP would have tried it. This particular hybrid disk structure differs from the DVD, as this particular structure doesn't involve ISO-9660:1988.

For this case, dd won't work for a second detail. The native DVD sector size is different than the native sector size on USB disk drives and USB flash drives, and the EFI boot structures are necessarily tailored for 2048-byte sector sizes and not the 512-byte sector sizes. In simplest terms, the boot sector offsets will be wrong. This can be fixed, but you're basically bombing the boot structures after dd completes if you want to try this. (That is not so bad once you have a working OpenVMS I64 box around, but it's more involved when you don't as you have to track CRCs and such. And in aggregate, more than I'd rather explain.)

In recent times, I've had mixed experiences with the USB interfaces on the zx2000 and rx2600 boxes. Some stuff works, and some stuff doesn't. (I'd not expect that these creative USB configurations were considered supported, but that's up to HP.)

Otherwise, you'll be learning about the boot structures. If you are interested in knowing details of the bootable disk format, Google is your friend. Lob a few obvious keywords from this posting and yee shall find; I've posted various topics and presentations on this, and a full article or two. IIRC, you've previously commented you're at HP. If that's the case, consider using your HP network access and poke around for details of the boot structures and for booting widgets via the USB interface on the various Integrity-series boxes. You might be able to acquire an internal disk image or such (as differentiated from a DVD image); that might also be a path forward here. This also assumes HP has disk images posted and available internally; AFAIK, there aren't any public disk images for bootable OpenVMS I64 disks.

Good luck with this stuff, too. You'll be learning much about EFI and about the organization of these servers as part of this whole process.

And yes, it's easiest to get that US$60 IDE DVD drive for the box.


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