I have a functioning 040 cube. It is fine but many of the Apps on it are damaged. Included among these apps are all of the developer tools. I very much want to use the developer apps on the NeXTstep but as of this moment I can't. I also see that they are not hosted on the file archive. I am running NeXTstep 3.2 on the cube, and have iso images for NS 3.3 and OS 4.2.
I currently have seemingly no way of getting these apps to work properly. I would think that my options would be either a) find replacement copies of the apps from another NS 3.2 system and copy them over or b) install a new OS from a CD. The problem with b) is that I have no SCSI cd-rom or floppy drives for the cube. What are my options to get a working system? Am I SOL?
What kind of external floppy or cd-rom drives are compatible with 040 cubes?
I would invest in an external SCSI CDROM drive. Then you should be able to reinstall the developer packages from your install CD.
Most 50-pin SCSI drives will work. I have a NeXT CD-ROM drive, but I have heard that Apple SCSI CD-ROM Drives will work as well. Last time I checked on eBay you could get one for about $20.00.
For most drives, you will a SCSI cable with a CN50 male on one end and a HD50 male plug on the other end as well as a CN50 male SCSI terminator.
I hope this helps. Maybe someone else could list known compatable SCSI-CD Drives.
Brian Moore
The other option is to setup in vmware/parallels/qemu/your choice of virtual machine an x86 nextstep 3.3 install since you have the iso, and then set it up as a netboot install server. You then netboot the Cube and reinstall Nextstep 3.3 onto the box and hey presto you've got a clean set of apps. Adding the Developers's disc via an NFS share is pretty easy once you've done a netinstall.
If you have a slab you can pull the floppy drive from that and look for a regular floppy ribbon cable for a pc (just make sure that you don't use the connector after the "twist" in the cable) and then with a bit of work, feed the ribbon cable out of the cube through one of the back slots and put it on top of the case for temporary use.
Noth,
I would love to see a how-to for installing NS/OS from an x86 VM to a black box. I tried this, thought I followed the documentation, but my black box failed to netboot from my VM.
I gave up trying to do a network install and got a CD-ROM drive. So I don't need to do a netinstall anymore, but I'm sure there would be several others who might be needing to do one and would find this information useful.
Brian Moore
Actually if you look in the Sun section of the forum I've posted a quick description of how to netboot. You'll just need to ajust for m68k hardware, which the system admin guide covers properly for prom commands.
Thanks for the info, all. I had no idea that there were multiple external SCSI interfaces, but I guess that makes sense. Curse my being 3 when NeXT was still kicking.
I see that lots of SCSI peripherals were designed to be daisy chained, which is good, because I am pretty sure that I need both a SCSI floppy drive and a SCSI cd drive to install on the cube. I have heard that basically only the CubeFloppy external drive works as an external drive for the cube, is this true? Also, do I need a terminator if I just have the cube and the cd drive as the only SCSI devices on the bus?
Quote from: "dai_vernon"Also, do I need a terminator if I just have the cube and the cd drive as the only SCSI devices on the bus?
The SCSI bus is designed to have a terminator (or termination) at both ends. you will need to check to see if your last external device in the SCSI chain has internal termination capabilities and if not, you will need to add an external terminator.