Thanks Jonny and Antonio,

Jonny's boot com file helped a little. At least I now know that
something doesn't work (and not just me not knowing what to do :-)

Although it's still looking pretty bad. I'm afraid the cold
garage is causing some damage to the VAX. I did run the TEST
again and got an error where I didn't get one last time. Now
it complains that M8230 is defective ...

I had an error in the second stage of the testing before, very
strange, where the power state of the UNIBUS caused some memory
check to fail or not to fail. I'm afraid that I have some backplane
touble or something. I was going to try booting anyway just to see
how far I could get.

This time I got up until a "BOOT-F-Unexpected Machine Check" somewhere
inside VMB.EXE running. I could never see any sign of special
activity, neither from the RA90 drive nor the UDA-50. The UDA-50
shows the cycling pattern on the LEDs, not unlike the KDA-50 in
my VAX6000s. It could be that I messed up the UDA-50s hardware
address, so it may never be talked to. Is there a way of examining
UNIBUS addresses from the console, so that I could see if some
magic number comes up at a certain address on the UDA-50 that
would indicate that I have the right hardware address?

As for VMS, at this time I have the VMS 5.2 disk hooked on the
780, and I would gladly take VMS for now if it would get that
far at all.

regards,
-Gunther