> AFAIK (and Ted may know more than I do), pmaxes can *use* standard
> 2048-byte block CD-roms, but they can only boot off drives that use
> 512-byte blocks.

Yup.   You kind of need an RRD40 or RRD42, unfortunately.   You may be
able to jumper a non-DEC drive to run with 512-byte blocks (actually,
I'm not sure whether it's 512-byte blocks you need or 2048 - it's not
the default, whatever that is).

> Without such a drive, you're still stuck getting some usable boot
> media.  Who out there (MAXINE owners aside) has a floppy drive on
> their DECstation?

The non-MAXine floppies are all SCSI-based, so they should be
bootable.  I don't think the MAXine will even boot off its floppy.
You could dd the first N blocks of the CD-ROM onto a hard drive with
some other machine to make yourself a root partition and then and boot
off of the hard drive.  Indeed, it might be winning to partition the
CD-ROM with this in mind.

			       _MelloN_