HP 9000/720 specific notes

Over time I have accumulated a couple of these boxes. Probably due to their age (1991) none of them was 100% OK. One of the weak points seems to be the PSU, probably ElCos. Others had their CPU boards removed (incomprehensible to me). Fortunately the modular design allows to combine parts from different machines to get at least a single working one.
The 720 is particular interesting for me, because it is a representative of the famous "Snake" workstations, which hit the streets in early 1990s. At GSI we had two of them from about 1992 until their final decommissioning in 1997. From that time frame I still have a couple of fbackup tapes, so a respective restoration project is on top of my agenda.

Pixx

RAM

Memory from/for model 735 seems to fit.
Slots have to be populated pairwise.

Graphics

By means of an RGB-VGA adapter video may work on a flatscreen monitor (my Eizo L66 did).

HP-UX versions

From the Owner's Guide:

>= 8.01

Restoring an ancient 720 system

Inherited fbackup tapes of an HP-UX 8.07 system disk and a separate user filesystem. Decided to try to restore the system on a piece of original hardware. Kind of "Jurassic PARisC" :-)

via Support Tape

Been there, tried it, did not succeed.
I quit when the tape drive with the fbackup tape was not recognized, although the Support Tape did work with the very same drive.

via Original CD-ROM

Installed HP-UX 8.07 from Install/CoreOS CDs as usual (Base system only).
On a running HP-UX machine frecovered an fbackup DDS-1 tape to a scratch directory.
tarred the contents of that directory to DDS tape, excluding hpux, /dev, /etc/sbtab and other "critical" objects.
Restored stuff from the tar tape.
Adapted critical files which do not match the new system environment:
- /etc/checklist, /etc/mnttab, /etc/rmtab
- Setup network as for an original installation.
- Check /etc/netlinkrc, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf.
- In /usr/lib/X11/vue/Vuelogin/Xservers enable the line
```
*   Local local /usr/bin/X11/X :0
```
  otherwise VUE won't start on init 3 or init 4
NFS-mounted restored /users and /usr/local

Last updated: 11-Mar-2009, M.Kraemer