PDP 11 Hacking: GOT IT WORKING!!!

From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com>
Date: Wed Feb 9 19:15:36 2005

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Jerome H. Fine wrote:

> Other question:
>
> (a) Which memory are you using?

I ended up with a Camintonn MEV-504 which is a 2MB Qbus card.

> (b) Does the DSD drive work as well?

The DSD drive works on drive 1. I'm about to go open it to see about why
drive 0 is not spinning.

> (c) How do you clean the heads on an RX02 drive?

With a standard 8" drive cleaning kit (I've got several around here
somewhere) or with a cotton swab and some head cleaner. If you go with
the latter method, you must open the RX02 enclosure, then remove a screw
or two that allows you to flip up the controller board, but you must
remove a bunch of cables and connectors to do so (make sure you note where
they go; they're all pretty obvious except for the small cables that go
off to each drive, which are on different positions on their respective
connectors). The drive heads are then accessible, and you can clean them
with a bit of your preferred cleanser and a cotton swab. Then
re-assemble in reverse.

I did this with Howard Harte's RX02 drive when we were reading disks on
his system last week and it made a huge difference with certain disks:
they would return numerous read errors until I cleaned the drive head
(which had a skidmark on it) and then they read just fine (except for one
which had a hard error).

-- 
Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Wed Feb 09 2005 - 19:15:36 GMT

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