Eric,

Actually, I wanted to test that issue with several third-party
MFM disks I picked up recently.  I've got several Vaxstation 2000s,
which I thought I was fairly familiar with, but now I'm stumped.
I have a stock BCC08 DEC console cable, as well as some of the 
H8571-B "Blocks" that let you plug an MMj6 "DecConnect" cable 
into a MicroVax.  It was my recollection that I was getting 
console on the Vaxstation 2000 using either of these cabling
configurations, on the printer port.  I've just spent the 
last hour verifying that I can get boot console on a 
Microvax using either configuration, and using either Kermit
from a PC running Linux, or a VT420 terminal.

On any of the 4 configurations on the Vaxstation I'm seing
only a '0' on the screen when I turn it on.  Am I forgetting
something?

Doug


On 8 Jul 2000, Eric Smith wrote:

> > With the Vaxstation, you need to know
> > the answers to a series of questions it will ask you.  Someone 
> > has posted examples for RD52, RD53 and RD54,
> [...]
> > Looking XT1140 up in my handy POCKET PCRef, I find that the 
> > CHS is (917,15,17), and the RD54 (XT2190) is (1224,15,17).
> > Formatted capacity 119 Mb, about a third of the way between an RD53 and
> > RD54.
> 
> If a drive with CHS that doesn't match any normal DEC RDxx drive is
> formatted on a VAXstation 2000, will an RQDX3 deal with it properly?
> 
> I thought that the drive parameters were *required* to match the DEC
> drives.  It's my understanding that the RQDX3 does strange and wondrous
> things to figure out what kind of drives are attached.  Are there some
> on-disk structures describing the geometry which the controller will
> respect?
>