RK05 stuff (was RE: cctalk Digest, Vol 10, Issue 74)

From: Ashley Carder <wacarder_at_usit.net>
Date: Tue Jun 29 19:12:00 2004

Tony,

I very much appreciate all the helpful hints and advice.
I will print off this email and keep it with my drives. I
should be able to hook them up to a pdp 11 in the next month
or two, when I get my RK11 controller. At that time I will
closely follow your words of wisdom.

Can you tell me more about St. Chad, etc?

Ashley

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces_at_classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctalk-bounces_at_classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Tony Duell
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 5:54 PM
To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: RK05 stuff (was RE: cctalk Digest, Vol 10, Issue 74)


> When I received the drives, I took the cover off and looked
> inside. They appear to be very clean. There are tags on both
> drives that indicate that they passed a maintenance check in
> 1997. I have applied power to both drives. The toggle switches
> all seem to work and the appropriate lights come on.

OK, the power supply is probably fine, but it can't hurt to check the
voltages...

Also make sure the blower is running (and is not smoking -- these motors,
particularly in the 230V version -- suffer from insulation breakdown
which can be spectacular!). Check for airflow at the duct on the left
side of the baseplate, just to make sure there;s not a complete blockage
somewhere.

>
> I have the various RK05 technical manuals and an RK05 maintenance
> course for field engineers. I have started looking at these
> documents.
>
> Once I hook up the drives to the RK11 controller on the 11/40
> or 11/34, what would be the steps involved in testing these drives
> and getting them up and running if they're mechanically sound?
> They were shipped from Ohio to South Carolina. I do not want to
> destroy the heads the first time I put a pack in the drives.

Turn off the positioner (there's a swtick on the servo amplifier PCB on
top of the PSU for this -- IIRC you put it down to disable the
positioner). Power up, put a pack in, and switch to run. Check the motor
starts and that everything seems to be runing correctly.

Spin down, enable the positioner again, pray to the patron saint of old
computers [1], spin up and keep you hand on the load swtich. Wait for the
heads to load, If you get unpleasant noises, spin down at once. Assuming
the heads load correctly, then try running some kind of diagnostics, or
attempt to boot an OS (if you have a bootable OS on an RK05 pack).

When I got my first RK05, I was really worried about headcrashes. As it
turned out, thr drive was fine, but I had a long job tracing logic faults
in the RK11-C (rows fo flip-chip cards) controller...

[1] This is presumably St Chad of Hackforth [2] :-)

[2] I believe thrre is a St Chad. And there's certainly a place in
England called Hackforth. AFAIK the 2 have no connection, but the names
have obvious meanings to old computer hackers.

-tony
Received on Tue Jun 29 2004 - 19:12:00 BST