Good news on my RK05 drives

From: Ashley Carder <wacarder_at_usit.net>
Date: Sun Jul 25 21:45:50 2004

I just wanted to give everyone an update on my RK05
adventures. Yesterday I received an RK11-D controller
card set and backplane. I decided to be adventurous
and install it in my 11/34. I surprised myself by getting
it right the first time. I installed the 4-slot backplane
with the cards and plugged it into the BA11-k's power plugs
that were available under the bottom. Then I moved the
terminator card from the last slot on my existing backplane
to the last slot on the RK11 backplane. I then connected the
two backplanes together with an M9202 unibus connector. I
booted up fine, no unibus config errors. So far so good.

Then today I decided to cable everything up to my two RK05J
drives and see if I would be lucky enough to have a working
drive (or two). I cleaned out the drives, making sure to remove
any small particles of dust/foam/etc. I connected a unibus
cable from the RK11 to the first RK05 (drive 0). I then
connected another cable from drive 0 to drive 1 (the second
Rk05 drive). I powered everything on to make sure that
the drives still behaved correctly when I pressed the RUN button.
They did.

I then put an untested, but clean looking RK05 pack in drive
0 and attempted to access the drive with a little Basic-Plus
program I wrote in my 11/34 RSTS/E system.

Drive 0 seems to have problems reading, but does spin up
and light the ON-CYL and READY lights. I need to watch the head
when I attempt to do a READ and see if it's doing anything.
Experts, does this sound like an alignment problem or
something else?

Drive 1 works perfectly and can read the pack just fine. I
modified my program to read blocks in various positions on
the pack (1st block, 100th block, 700th block, 1500th block,
2000th block, etc). It had no problems.

Now I need to troubleshoot that first drive to try to determine
why it is having problems reading. It spins up fine, but gets
errors reading. I have not investigated any further.

Thanks to Tony, Al, Ethan, Paul, Henk and others here who gave me
advice and encouragement on this little adventure. It was
pretty exciting to hook up some 30 year old drives to my 27
year old computer and get one of them to work!

I guess St. Chad was there too!

Ashley
Received on Sun Jul 25 2004 - 21:45:50 BST