Getting PDP 11/03 running, last update to the saga for tonight

From: Jerome H. Fine <jhfinexgs2_at_compsys.to>
Date: Thu Feb 3 15:57:55 2005

>Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

>Ok, so I found some (3) RT11 system disks, just where they should have
>been. Duh.
>
>I tried booting each and I don't get anything. The drive klunks and I see
>the drive LED blink two times but then nothing. It seems something is not
>right.
>
>Believe it or not, this is the first real time I've played around with a
>PDP 11 so I'm green here. Am I attempting to boot correctly? I turn on
>power, then turn on DC. If I have the ENABLE switch on then it tries to
>boot from the floppies (at least it sounds and looks like it). Where
>should the LTC switch be? ON or OFF? The only difference I notice is
>that when I issue a 173000G I get a prompt back immediately instead of the
>system "locking up".
>
>BTW, when I halt the system after the booting fails, it always comes back
>showing it halted at 173204.
>
>I found a millipede walking around my warehouse. I have no idea how he
>got there, but I took pity on him and put him outside in a fern where he
>belongs.
>
>
Jerome Fine replies:

I don't have much luck when I need to fix my own
hardware and even less with hardware when I am not
on site. But I tend to remember that not every 8"
floppy is bootable as an RX02 - many are actually
RX01 bootable even though an RX02 drive and the
DY.SYS device driver can read them in SD (single
density) mode.

Until you are able to boot an 8" floppy on hardware
that works successfully, you don't know (well I am
able to figure out) which type of floppy drive is
needed. And it would seem in your case that you
can't boot at all.

Sorry for not being able to suggest anything specific.

I commend you for placing the millipede where he belongs.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
--
If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail
address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk
e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be
obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the
'at' with the four digits of the current year.
Received on Thu Feb 03 2005 - 15:57:55 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:37:35 BST