Talk:4.3 BSD NFS Wisconsin Unix

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This is interesting! Do you have any tips on how to get this to install? Specifically, the layout of the tape image and the procedure to get it booting? That part always seemed a bit like black magic to me, I'd just copy-and-paste the instructions and pray until I got to a # prompt! Lucky 19:44, 4 April 2010 (UTC)


I didn't realize that I didn't write an install... It was pretty much the same as 4.3 BSD in that I just extracted the bootra program, and kicked it to boot from the miniroot cheating... The 'correct' way doesn't work....

neozeed 04:23, 5 April 2010 (UTC)


Ok I've laid out a working plan to boot this thing... for some reason I had a world of trouble with the ra81 disks... but the HP stuff works ok. Go figure. Someone on the SIMH mailing list gave me a 'hint' that you can run the 'boot' programs directly on SIMH by stepping the funky console that really is only geared to running VMS. So it was a matter of reading out the assembly code of what you'd "toggle in", and manually loading it into location 0, and setting whatever flags as needed.

Once the boot program is loaded, pointing it to a miniroot that's been mounted under an emulated disk works fine, as if you had a real VAX back in the day that was basically what the 'copy' program from the 'stand' program would do. Sadly I've never had any luck running the stand programs on SIMH...

Anyways I've booted it up again, and it should be somewhat straight forward to follow. You can add tonnes more HP disks into the VM if you want the space, and probably figure out some other RA type disks that'll work.

neozeed 00:48, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

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