PDP 11 Hacking: GOT IT WORKING!!!

From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com>
Date: Tue Feb 8 23:52:55 2005

Son of a biatch! I finally got it working. I think it may have been bad
disks all along.

Ok, so I put a disk labeled "DIAGNOSTIC" in the drive and tried to boot.
No go. So I pulled it out and I noticed it had dust on the disk surface
(at the head window). Hmmm, doesn't look like it was even spinning. So I
tried it a few more times observing the head window and it didn't change
at all. To be sure, I aligned the index hole on the disk with the index
hole on the sleeve and re-tried. It definitely didn't move. Drive 0 is
not spinning the disk!

So I tried with Drive 1. This time, I actually got something!

$DY1
?BOOT-F-No boot on volume
?

Hmm, no DOS? So I tried one of the RT11/RX02 disks:

$DY1
?BOOT-F-No boot on volume
?

Same thing. Then another:

$DY1
?BOOT-U-No boot on volume
?

Same thing. And another:

$DY1
?BOOT-U-No boot on volume

And then finally another:

??H?=DY1
?BOOT-F-I/O error
000726

Ok, a little better! One more time on this one:

_at_?
$DY1
?BOOT-F-I/O error
000726

Ok, so it's bad (or the drive heads are really dirty...gotta clean those
at some point). In the meantime, let's try this OTHER disk:

_at_
$DY1
RT-11SJ V03B-00

Hey!

.R SST


** U.T. -SUPER- STAR TREK **

LATEST UPDATE- 15-FEB-77

FREE MOVE SCHEME CHANGED. FREEZE IMPLEMENTED.
COMPUTER ADVICE FOR MOVE TIME AND ENERGY ADDED.
"SRSCAN CHART" INPLEMENTED.

WOULD YOU LIKE A TOURNAMENT OR FROZEN GAME ?

Well whaddya know? It works! And it has a way sweet Star Trek game on
there to boot. How cool!

Well, no more time to play around tonight. Will get back to it tomorrow
to investigate why drive 0 is not spinning up and to clean the heads.

Thanks for all the help!!

-- 
Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Tue Feb 08 2005 - 23:52:55 GMT

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