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HP OpenVMS Systemsask the wizard |
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The Question is: I have a relatively unusual question related to trying to boot a Digital Personal Workstation (DPW433) under OpenVMS. Although I think this is an unsupported model, I have successfully booted and I am currently using it without any problem but one : the graphic's card. I have tried the PBCGC-AA card, the mother board complains about it (it says that an unknown device is plugged to slot #xx) Then, I tried an old PMAGB-AA card which is recognized by the board but DECwindows crashes the system when starting. I am wondering if there is anything I can try such as the PGBXGA-AA, PBXGA-BA or PBXGB-AA or any other suggested card at this point ... Note that I do have the most recent Open3D A049 installed. Could you please advise me on that ? I would really like to have this solved since we no longer have any other use for that Workstation which was initially purchased with WindowsNT loaded. Having it in our OpenVMS Alpha cluster is really one more CPU for us but I would also like to turn it into a decent workstation for the many users we have. Thanks in advance for advices. The Answer is : The problem with trying to use OpenVMS on an unsupported system involves the unsupported and/or untested hardware configuration -- and cases where some testing was performed and there are known to be various problems -- and the resulting problems that can (and regularly do) arise with these configurations. In this case, various of the Personal Workstation "-a" series will not have the appropriate bus interface chip nor the IDE bridge chip suited nor I/O controllers suited for use by OpenVMS. While certain versions of the bus interface can be gotten to work under OpenVMS, and the Intel SIO IDE bridge provides most of what the Cypress (the interface chip used in the supported "-au" series platform) provides -- save for the inability to bootstrap from the IDE CD-ROM and the requirement for manual device configuration -- and you can swap out the various PCI controllers for supported widgets, the OpenVMS Wizard does not know if the resulting configuration will work or will be reliable. In other words, you are largely on your own -- the OpenVMS Wizard does not know the answer(s) to the "what might work here?" question posed.
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