Re: formating a disk

[bouma@cs.purdue.edu]

  Paul Cross writes:
  >It sounds to me, too, that you weren't scanning in all the files.  The
  >only thing I'd add is that if you get an error about something not
  >starting with FEP Overlay, you're trying to scan a file that is not a
  >flod file.
  >
  >Hint:  When you later need to do a Load Microcode on the machine, you
  >can do that off the cart, too.  Or, you can Disk Restore it off the
  >tape.  Use this to put microcode on a tape: ...
  >
  >Then you can do a Load Microcode cart:0 or Load Microcode cart:1,
  >depending on who's right about the indexing scheme, or just a normal
  >Load Microcode if you restored the file.
  >
  >Good Luck.

So far I have had nothing but bad!  Why is this procedure so complicated,
anyway?  All I want is a clean disk with the initial FEP filesystem on it.
Please, someone tell me what it takes to get this done?  Every time it
seems like I am making some progress I get stuck.  Enough whining, on to
the facts:

Once I get the flods loaded, then what?  The documentation says I have to
"clear machine", "load microcode", "set disk type",  then "disk restore".
Well, all these operations try to access the tape drive.  What tape am I
supposed to have in there?  "Clear machine" seems to fail on every tape.
So I tried just loading microcode from a tape wrote using Paul Cross'
instructions.  That seemed to take.  Then I dumped the IFS tape in the
machine and did "disk restore".  That gave an error of "not FEP overlay".
An annoyance here is that every time you get an error the machine forgets
all the FEP commands and you gotta reload the flod tape again by typing
"load cart:" 7 times!

I appeal to anyone who knows to please explain the procedure.

Bill <bouma@cs.purdue.edu>