Dear Allison,
   
   You wrote:
> Though cable wise I'd rather do two 3.5" MFMs.
   
   Non-standard cabling is always fun, isn't it? :-)
   
> < How do you have it configured in Ultrix?
>
> No idea.  Unix/ultrix is a toy I play with. I only have one system
> running that.  The rest run VMS, RT-11, CP/M.
>
> <Did you write your own driver, use some DEC-confidential code, or
> <simply play with the kernel config file?
>
> Unknown.  The machine was from Umass Amhurst junkpile as did the RD53 in
> it.  It looks vanilla to me.
   
   Oh, so you didn't install and configure Ultrix on it yourself. I see.
   
> I think if you were to go to the Ultrix internals courses that dec
> offered plus docs, writing one is not a unresonable task.
   
   Writing any driver for a VAX is real work. At the very least you have to
learn VAX programming. You'll do it if your job depends on it (my case, the
fact that the job is currently a volunteer one notwithstanding), but I
doubt that a hobbyist retrocomputist would invest that much effort into
hooking up one disk to one machine, no matter how much SCSIness is in the
disk and how much VAXness is in the VAX.
   
   A more likely scenario is that the guy you have inherited your setup
from has found the secret as to how to remove the artificial blocking.
Maybe I'll find it too when I take a look at it, we'll see.
   
   It would be really helpful if you could locate the kernel config file
for the kernel you are running. It should be somewhere like /sys/conf or
/sys/vax/conf.
   
   Sincerely,
   Michael Sokolov
   Phone: 440-449-0299
   ARPA Internet SMTP mail: sokolov@alpha.ces.cwru.edu