Agilent 16702A failing to install to blueSCSI HD image

[BinaryDinosaurs]

Hello all,

I recently got myself an 16702A that apparently used to be owned by Motorola and was involved in pattern generating. I'm basing this assumption that despite it having a pair of 16712A analyser cards the cables for those are bundled up in the pouch looking like new and the pattern generator card has a full compliment of cables installed that are labelled for use.

Unfortunately it came with no flying probes or grabbers, but I have a fully populated HP1660a I can thieve pods from.

Its Quantum SCSI drive was toast so I'm using a BlueSCSI desktop unit from earlier in the year, latest firmware. I downloaded the Ignite image thanks to the fine folks here and copied it to the SDCARD as ID 0, and also created an empty 4.5GB image to live at SCSI ID 6 for the Ignite process. When booting it sees everything and I can boot from the CD image with no issue. It will also boot from an external SCSI CDROM I have from back in my DEC days. The install runs through reasonably quickly but it gets to this point and sits there for hours; so far I've left it for 3.5h and it doesn't move.



If I'm booted from external CDROM it will also stop here but the activity light will blink every so often.

It's only installing the VUE desktop, any reason for it to pause/stop here?

Cheers
Adrian

[hp3310a]

I have no idea how to actually do what you're told  but the error message

Code: [Select]

Unable to add all swap for device: /dev/vg00/lvo12. Increase the tunable parameter maxswapchunks by 512  and reconfigure your system.
sounds pretty final to me, no amount of waiting will help.

[artag]

I've done this somewhat succesfully but I had problems writing the blueSCSI disc. It seemed writes were sometimes failing and the installation ended up corrupt. A friend was doing it at the same time (with a different SD card) and had more success : I copied his SD image and ran OK.

I don't think I resolved the writing problem but once running it doesn't happen much. I think the BlueSCSI code has received a fix since and I wiill install that when I need to start using it again.

I agree with hp3310a that the swap issue is likely a problem though I didn't encounted that on my install. However it might be worth just fitting a pre-written SD image and not doing the install.

 

[gslick]

I have no idea how to actually do what you're told  but the error message

Code: [Select]

Unable to add all swap for device: /dev/vg00/lvo12. Increase the tunable parameter maxswapchunks by 512  and reconfigure your system.
sounds pretty final to me, no amount of waiting will help.

I'm pretty sure that message is not unexpected during a 16700-series reignite OS install and requires no user action, and the OS install should continue normally.

I would have to set up a 16700 mainframe to go through the reginite process and capture the installation process output messages to verify that I remember that correctly.

[BinaryDinosaurs]

Yes, I thought about the SDcard last night. Since I'm using a microSD in an adapter instead of a full size card there are sometimes issues with the compatibility of the adapter itself. Seems strange that the pause/lock is at the same point every time though which would usually indicate a bad source CD, but the one I'm using is the supposed 'good' one with the checksum ending in bd12d2.

As for the swap error, I don't recall similar messages being issues from my DEC Unix days but they were a long time ago now.

I'll dig out a full size sdcard and try again.

[BinaryDinosaurs]

Some cussing and rude words plus a brand new full size SDcard later I get success 



It's not quick though, and the BlueSCSI activity light is on pretty much constantly so I'll head over to their Discord to see if I'm missing anything from the config.

For lols if I can find a SE-SCA SCSI adapter in my workshop I'll give some old 9GB Compaq drives a go. Noisy but a good speed comparison, though it's 30+ degrees C here all week so running a 27yo metal instrument might not be wise!

Cheers