🚀 go-pugleaf

psiders@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU (Paul Siders) writes:

>I shutdown and powerdown the system, insert the first VRM diskette, then
>turn on the power.  The light on the floppy drive comes on briefly, goes
>out, then comes on once more, briefly.  THEN the system comes up in multi-
>user mode under AIX 2.2 .  This behavior is repeatable.  I've tried it
>at least 10 times.
>(1) Why is this happening and what can I do about it?  

Some RT's (or versions of VRM, I'm not sure which) have this feature (?)
whereby the machine keeps a record of where it's principal boot should
come from... It essentially will not boot from floppy no matter how you
coax it... I'm a little fuzzy on the details as to why this happens.. I
had some guru at IBM explain this to me a couple of years ago and I've
since forgotten the rationale.... HOWEVER, to fix it just get the RT to
some sort of shell (bourne, csh.... etc..) and type "CTRL-ALT-A"... If
you type "CTRL-ALT-C" the machine will never boot from the floppy, always
from the hard-disk... If you type "CTRL-ALT-A" it will first attempt to
boot from the floppy and then boot from disk... I know this sounds REAL
hoaky and everything but I've had to do this as recently as last week
on a 6150-135 with AIX 2.2.1... I can't for the life of me make this
happen on my RT at home... It's a 6150-20 running AIX 2.2.1... I suspect
maybe it has something to do with the level of VRM you're running...


>(2) Can I install VRM without using the installation menu?  Could I, for
>    example, simply copy all the files from the VRM diskettes onto the
>    hard disk /vrm minidisk?

I doubt it.


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