Good news on my RK05 drives

From: Ashley Carder <wacarder_at_usit.net>
Date: Wed Jul 28 00:07:37 2004

I tried a DSKINT in RSTS/E. It errors attempting to write, claiming
that there's a bad block on track 0 (or sector 0). The disk reads
perfectly fine in the other drive, no bad blocks.

I wrote a little test program to attempt to read random blocks and I
watched the read/write head. It did move in and out like it should.
If it was attempting to read a low numbered block, it moved just a
little bit. If it was attempting to read a high numbered block, it
moved farther toward the center of the platter. However, every
attempt to read or write resulted in an error. The head would
position to the appropriate(?) position on the disk, sit there a
short while, and then move back to cylinder 0.

I suppose I could swap boards with the good drive to verify the
boards.

Any other ideas? I guess that some day soon I'm going to have
to learn more low-level technical stuff and how to troubleshoot
electronic components (I keep saying that!).

- Ashley

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces_at_classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctalk-bounces_at_classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Tony Duell
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2004 12:06 AM
To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Good news on my RK05 drives


> 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?

I'm not an expert, but...

Maybe an alignment problem, maybe soemthing else. What you want to do is
take a pack you don't care about the contents of, and attempt to format
and verify it in drive 0 (this will erase everything on the pack). If
this works, then the problem is radial alignment (head alignment) -- the
drive can read/write correctly, but just not in the same place as other
drives.

If it fails, then there's something else wrong. Maybe head positioning,
maybe the read/write board, maybe... You then need to do more
troubleshooting, maybe with a'scope, while the drive is
formatting/verifying to see just what is going on.

-tony
Received on Wed Jul 28 2004 - 00:07:37 BST

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