I would use some caution here.   Since MPE wasn't really set up to expect that you'd move a disk image to a bigger disk there is a chance you'll have problems when/if you try to go past that 36 GB. 

Why do you see 72GB ?  IIRC some commands will do a SCSI "READ CAPACITY" command to tell you the disk size.   These commands will show whatever the disk happens to reply with. 

At the same time there is some data populated when a volume is initialized; one of those is the Secondary Storage Management (SSM) bit map.    It may be that some aspects the disk volume resident structures were built ASSUMING that you'd have a 36GB disk and ONLY a 36GB Disk:  that is using the value of returned by READ CAPACITY when the volume was initialized.   

Regards,

Jim 

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dennis Grevenstein
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2013 3:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Mpe: backup MPE/IX

Hi,

Am 25.03.2013 um 21:24 schrieb Gilles Schipper <[log in to unmask]>:

> The dd backup that you are contemplating will do you no good if you were to ever need it.
> 
> You certainly will not be able to boot from it, and the "files" contained therein would be difficult, if not impossible, to restore - not to mention the very important directory component of your system.

I'm not sure, what to say, maybe I am really doing something wrong here.
But that's exactly what I did. Originally, I wanted to attach the disk to another machine, but couldn't find one where I could easily plug in an SCA SCSI disk. Since the A500 is rather common hardware at the chipset level, I thought I would just download a Debian HPPA netinst ISO and install Linux on a spare SCSI disk. It worked fine for the most part, although Linux seems to have some problems with the onboard tulip ethernet which works, but only at 10Mbit/s.
I did a full backup of the MPE/IX system disk like this:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=backup_of_my_disk.img
This gave me a 36GB file which I then again wrote back to a new 72GB SCSI disk. This really takes a lot of time, but the system boots up just fine from the new disk.

:discfree E                                                                     
                                                                                
DISCFREE A.50.01 Copyright (C) Hewlett-Packard 1992.  All rights reserved.      
                         MON, MAR 25, 2013,  9:15 PM                            
                                                                                
ALL MEASUREMENTS ARE IN SECTORS.                                                
ALL PERCENTAGES ARE RELATIVE TO THE DEVICE SIZE.                                
                                                                                
           |    Configured     |      In Use       |     Available     |        
-----------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+        
                                                                                
TOTALS :                                                                        
 Device    |  284527984        |    7354320 (  3%) |  277173664 ( 97%) |        
 Permanent |  210550704 ( 74%) |    6886880 (  2%) |  203663824 ( 72%) |        
 Transient |  210550704 ( 74%) |     467440 (  0%) |  210083264 ( 74%) |        
                                                                                
What puzzles me is the recognized disk size. I had expected that it would only recognize 36GB, but
((284527984 * 256) / 1024) / 1024 = 69464MB It seems like MPE/IX for some reason knows that it's now running from a 72GB disk. Unless I made a mistake of course.

> As far as the serial connections are concerned, your A500 would have 3 such serial ports - one for the native console, one for a remote console modem, and one for a UPS connection.

right. I found the serial splitter cable now.

> The HP terminal you have should work fine with the console port in HP mode.

I could get it to work. Unfortunatly for some reason unknown to me, it stopped working again. I can plug the very same cable that used to work with the 700/92 into my USB-serial adapter and it works.

> As Donna suggested, QTERM, the terminal emulator for the PC from AICS-research should work fine, once you've configured and enable network access to your A500.


I don't have a PC, sorry. I'm just using minicom, which is a common terminal emulator, on a Mac.

In the meantime, I also found out how to open the posix shell which makes me feel a little bit more at home. Now that I can safely store the original harddisk, I will play with the machine some more and read some documentation on how to configure the system. Thank you all.

Someone here also offered to check on where one can get a gcc binary. I would really like to know where to download this, because I couldn't find it anywhere.

Dennis

--
Don't suffer from insanity...
Enjoy every minute of it.

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