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The native VMB.EXE program historically supported a Boot Block oriented
boot if Bit 3 of the parameter register (R5) was set when VMB was invoked.
This Boot Block boot operation reads sector 0 into memory and starts
execution at offset 2 of the data block in memory.
When portitions of VMB were migrated into ROM to support the earliest
MicroVAX system (MicroVAX I) and all subsequent ROM based VMB versions
the concept of Boot Block booting was extended in these ROM VMB
implementations. The change in boot block booting functionality included
several features:
1) If a normal boot attempt to a device failed (due to VMB not being
able to locate a secondary bootstrap program), a boot block boot is
automatically attempted. If the Bit 3 of R5 was set, then the
initial search for a secondary boot block was avoided and a boot
block boot was immediately attempted.
2) When performing a boot block boot, the sector 0 contents are examined
and if these contents conform to the pattern defined for ROM based
(PRA0) booting, the ROM format Offset, Size, and Starting address
information is used directly by VMB to load a program into memory
and control is transferred to that program. If the contents of
sector 0 do not fit the pattern required for ROM based booting, then
the code in sector 0 is executed directly starting at offset 2,
the same as was originally done with the non ROM based VMB versions.
Note that this extended behavior allows sector 0 to contain very little
information and quite possibly no actual boot code.
Developers of alternate operating systems for VAX computers noticed the ROM
based boot block behavior and changed their installation media AND the disk
structures to only provide the minimal boot information required on the
systems with VMB installed in ROM.
Since, when this active development of these alternate operating systems for
VAX computers was happening, the vast majority of development and new system
deployments were to hardware which had ROM base VMB, no one noticed that
older systems which booted with the non ROM based VMB could no longer boot
from new install media or disks formatted with these operating systems.
This patch addeds the ROM based VMB boot block boot functionality to the
original dynamically loaded VMB.EXE used by the older systems to boot.
The patch overwrites some VMB code which exists to support NVAX(1302) and
Neon-V(1701) systems. If simh simulators for these systems are ever built
an alternate location must be found to accomodate this extended logic