On 5 Mar 1999, Michael Kukat wrote:
> Disk boot is a nice idea, but most VAXens don't have disk drives as i
> know. CD-Boot would also be nice, but who cas create a VAX-bootable
> CD-ROM. I checked it out, it seems that the CD-BOOT on VAXen only work
> with VMS-CDs. The file system must match and on an ISO9660 disc you only
> get something like ?FILESTRUCT or so.

Well, it's quite easy to make a bootable CD that works on a VAX.
The only thing one need to do is to make a CD with a UFS filesystem
on, i've done several that booted just fine on my VS3100. A bootable disk
or tapeimage written to a CD with cdwrite (on linux) boots without
problems. The only thing i need to make a complete distributionimage
is a kernel like the one Ragge made some time ago with sysinst in it.
I've tried to make a CD with a complete live filesystem on it, but
the kernel can't mount it. Therefore one must make a kernel with
a memdisk in it, and work from there. I've made such a kernel, but
it was impossible to boot it from disk for some strange reason.
It worked great when netbooted, and there was no problem mounting
the cd with a UFS filesystem from it and install from there.
OK, the installation was slow because of the PIO SCSI driver, but
it worked otherwise.=20

The only thing one must remember is that the CD _MUST_ be able to
use 512 bit blocksize, but then again that is a must on almost any
UNIX system.

Netbooting isn't the easiest way to make a installation, since not
everyone has a server available to put the netbooting stuff on.
A SCSI CD is quite easy to come by, and almost everyone can relatively
easy get their hands on a CD-writer nowadays. My suggestion is that
we should make a bootable ISO-image available for download with the
distribution on it. The VAXen treats the CD as a read only disk,
and it boots without a hitch given that one must have the root filesystem
on a memorydisk.=20

cheers,
/Anders=20

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