RE: OS/400 V4R3 installation CDs -- MIDRANGE-L

Thanks for the prompt responses!

On the license, the graybeard who sold it to me also handed me a printout of the license screen. I have taken a photo of this, which has been digitally backed up in several places. I'm planning of making another printout of the license screen, have it laminated, then glued to the inside of the side panel of the case.

On the 512B vs 520B sector, this has been supported in BlueSCSI for at least a couple of years, IIRC. A lot of the non-standard SCSI commands IBM uses have also been supported for a while. There's a post on bluesky from 9 months ago <https://bsky.app/profile/bluescsi.com/post/3lscezpihkc26> and an accompanying youtube video showing a BlueSCSI booting on what I believe is a CISC F20. The recently released BlueSCSI Ultra mentions explicitly AS/400 support <https://bluescsi.com/ultra#faq-gpio> .

I’m not sure I understand the power/cooling issue. If you’re referring to using modern SSDs, I can see how that can be an issue, but BlueSCSI is basically a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller emulating the SCSI interface and using a regular SD card as a storage medium. The whole thing should consume 1W of power under load, if not less. People have been putting them inside 3D printed plastic cases with zero ventilation inside some 90s notebooks with zero reported heating issues.

The main sticking point is the lack of testing of BlueSCSI on something like a model 170. There are still some documented unsupported custom SCSI commands. Whether those are show stoppers remains to be determined, hence why I want to test. With a bit of luck, I might be able to get some help from the developer of the BlueSCSI since I have a machine I can test with, and I’m fairly familiar with microcontroller development.

Kind Regards,
Ali Mualla

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Jim Oberholtzer
Sent: Thursday, 26 March 2026 17:29
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: OS/400 V4R3 installation CDs

Outside of using SVC those drives will not work, won’t be recognized by the system, and will entirely likely be burned up shortly due to power/cooling. Even the newer IBM drives will burn up due to cooling. (Learned that the hard way with Larry while building the Franken series boxes……)

Aside from the physical issues, there is as Charles pointed out the 512 vs 520 bytes sectors, but what’s 4 bytes among friends, right? 😉.

Also: If your system has keys, remember to save them before you try to rebuild it. Otherwise every 70 days you’ll do it again…….

Jim Oberholtzer

Agile Technology Architects

From: MIDRANGE-L < <mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Charles Wilt < <mailto:charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx> charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx>

Date: Thursday, March 26, 2026 at 11:16 AM

To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion < <mailto:midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject: Re: OS/400 V4R3 installation CDs

I'd be very shocked if BlueSCSI worked ... IBM AS/400 drives had some particular firmware and 520(?) byte sectors...

Honestly, a v4r3 is pretty dang old...installation has changed. Electronic delivery came out in v5r1.

Good luck!

Charles

On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 10:01 AM Ali Mualla < <mailto:geek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> geek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi all,

Long time lurker, first time writing here.

Yesterday, I became the proud owner of a Model 170 in fairly good

condition (IMO). Bought from a really nice retired gentleman who used

to work as an IT technician on IBM i hardware, and who came to deliver

the machine and help me set it up in my home network and connect to

it. The system came with a clean licensed install of V4R3. As I

understood from him, he restored the system from a QIC backup. I also

got a 5250 terminal box and an IBM keyboard, and in a couple of days

will receive PCMCIA 5250 cards bought from ebay in the US.

I’m a software engineer with almost 20 years of experience in about

half a dozen programming languages, but who’s new to AS/400 and has

been learning on and off for the past year using the great pub400.

As I live in Germany, the system came with the interface in German.

While I’m learning the language and debating using that as an extra

excuse to practice the language (and slowly reading Holger Scherer’s

Kurs für Einsteiger), but still want to learn and be able to install

the OS from scratch, since one of the things I want to try is

replacing the HDDs with BlueSCSI Ultra.

I was wondering if anyone in the community has V4R3 CDs or ISOs laying

around who’s willing to sell them, or sell CD-R copies or even provide

ISOs for download. I’m willing to pay for the hassle of making the

ISOs and uploading them somewhere.

Kind Regards,

Ali Mualla

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