Re: (unrelated) Re: NetBSD on Digital Personal Workstation 433a

[Paul Mather <paul%gromit.dlib.vt.edu@localhost>]

On Feb 19, 2019, at 6:00 PM, Dustin Marquess <dmarquess%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:

> I seem to recall block size still being an issue on some of the Alphas?
> 
> I had an external SCSI CD-RW drive that I kept just because it
> supported the 2k block size, and since it was SCSI, it made it easy to
> use with all of my Alphas...


A 2048-byte sector size is standard for CD optical media data disks.  What I remember being necessary for Alpha and Sun equipment was to be able to jumper the drive to present 512-byte sectors to be able to boot from CD.  I used a Plextor with my DEC 3000/300 Alpha because it had a jumper that allowed you to do this to the drive.

Cheers,

Paul.


> 
> -Dustin
> 
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 2:58 PM Michael Kronsteiner <alphamike%gmx.at@localhost> wrote:
>> 
>> You can clean "old-ish" cd-rom lenses with q-tips and isopropanol. did
>> this with many drives, even dvd.
>> 
>> even my old caddy drives - not even 1x speed - of the collection read
>> "burns".
>> 
>> maybe this helps. some machines from dec are also picky about block
>> size (512/2048 bytes) but i think this was VAX time.
>> 
>> ymmv. good success!
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, 2019-02-19 at 20:03 +0100, Martin Husemann wrote:
>>> Not sure what is up with yours, but I had serious trouble creating a
>>> CD-R
>>> that would be readable by the old CD drives in my alpha. I ended up
>>> net-booting and installing that way.
>>> 
>>> Martin
>> 
>