Hidden Value March 2005

Hidden Value details commands and procedures in MPE that can improve your productivity with HP 3000 systems. Share your tips — send them to john@burke-consulting.com

Edited by John Burke

We have a 969 and 997, both on MPE/iX 6.5. What is the maximum amount of memory supported?

3.75GB and 16GB, respectively. [Editor’s note: only the later 9x9 systems and 997 systems among the pre-A/N-class systems support more than 3.75GB, up to 16 GB.]

We had a disc crash the other day — needed to do an INSTALL and full restore. Everything is back to normal except for our Posix shell. When I run SH.HPBIN.SYS, the ‘cd’ command works but not any other command. Why?

Gilles Schipper replies:

Chances are the “full restore” was not done properly. You should be able to get back your Posix environment by restoring from your full backup, as follows

:hello manager.sys: :file t;dev=tape :restore *t;/ - @.@.@;show=offline;create;olddate;partdb;keep

This presumes the problem was with the original full restore. There would be a different solution if the Posix environment never made it on the backup to begin with. That would involve retrieving the original FOS tape and going from there.

Is it possible to copy information off a CD-ROM to the HP 3000?

Lars Appel replies:

With plain MPE/iX, you cannot. But there is a utility called CDCOPY, which can be downloaded from Jazz, which can copy selected files or directory trees from a CD to the MPE/iX file system. See jazz.external.hp.com/src/ and scroll down to CDCOPY. You might need to mount the CD using the AVRSCSI.INSTALL.SYS “MOUNT nn” utility (with nn being the LDEV number of your CD drive) before using CDCOPY on it.

How can I convert an SL to an XL?

Jeff Kell and Gavin Scott reply:

You can OCTCOMP an SL, which will make the code in it run in mostly-native mode (though using several times the memory) and with exactly the same limitations as the original CM code. OCTCOMP just adds a pre-translated version of the CM code to the end of the file that will be invoked when you run the program or SL on an MPE/iX system.

How do I detect in a CI script if my 9x9 or 99X system has multiple CPUs?

Guy Paul replies:

SETVAR NUM_PROCESSORS,STR(HPCPUNAME,12,1)

This should do the trick in most cases, i.e; for the 99X and 959-989.