I don’t maintain a separate boot drive per se, but I do use shadow sets throughout my cluster. Even with their age, though, I’ve yet to have a drive in one of my Vaxen actually fail. (I’d better not say that too loudly!)

On Nov 17, 2015, at 9:12 PM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:

Reading up about VAX 4000 support. I have a three drive 4000-200 in the BA430 enclosure. It also has a tape drive and ethernet device

Question - Do you formerly MARCH and now VCFedgerationites who are also VAX users with similar systems maintain more than one bootable drive as a rule of thumb? I am not detecting any issues with my primary drive but I don't want to take chances.

Just curious what kinds of support strategy ideas you may have. I have the manuals and have been reading up on backups, etc.

I just got a new hard drive and I need to replace a bad drive, amd I was thinking now would be a good time to set as the 2nd bootable drive, before I put anything on it. I thus could experiment with one drive knowing I have a fall-back that will boot. I am also reading up about how the three drives worth together, it's not as simple as "three independent hard drives" as far as I can tell. Interesting and complex file system. -- Bill