I seem to recall that when the ribbon cable is in backwards, the fault
light comes on.
True. First cable faults hard (READY/FAULT on) no matter what. Second
cable would turn off the Fault light and allow spinup (right direction)
and ready. However when I tried to boot the drive went fault.
Dug out a third (softer, less rigid) cable, same effect. Then I
remembered I bought the controller working on Ebay some 25 years ago, so
I went through my pile to find the original controller. Plugged that in...
Drive booted to RSX11M+ 4.2. Great, I have a blown board and a good
older controller. Enough to get going....
During all of this I had a minor setback: The MSV11-QC board (the one
with 4mb of memory on it stock) failed startup diagnostics with what
looks like a stuck bit. Used an 11/23+ to verify this and find the
memory region, now I need engineering schematics for that board so I can
replace one of the 41256 memory chips. On the positive side it looks
like a pretty obvious stuck bit, just need to know which chip is at that
address and memory location....
Fortunately I had a Clearmation (I think) backup memory board that has
only 2Mb of memory. Enough to get going at least...
Never dull. At least I can boot RL02's (will check more cables and such
today) which means I can get RSX11M up and figure out what went wrong
with my Hitachi ESDI disk (it's on an MTI controller which is *super
fast). That's the gold standard, I think it's a 300mb disk in two
partitions. One has RT11 on it (boots, limited drivers), the other has
RSX11M 4.0 with all my code, games, programming languages, and so forth.
When I try to boot that it faults to ODT, which could be a disk read
failure or possibly something wrong with the monitor. RSX11M 4.0 was
exceptionally finnicky when it came to devices and maybe something is
missing and causing it to blow up....
C
Paul
On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 7:55 PM Chris Zach via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>> wrote:
Normally my answer would be "no". *However* there is mention that
changing 3 jumpers on an RL02 will allow you to read an RL01 pack (not
write).
http://www.pdp-11.nl/peripherals/disk/rl-info.html
So... Maybe. However right now I'm trying to get the disks up. It's
been
20 years, and my cables are not in the best of shape. One cable seems
totally dead, as the RL02 flunks when connected to the controller
(DRIVE
0 and FAULT always on). With the second cable all lights are off and
the
drive spins up and goes ready, however as soon as I try to boot the
drive goes to FAULT. If I remove the 0 drive selector and put in a 1,
the fault goes out, however trying to boot DL1: gives the same error.
This happens on both drives with two different boot packs (old RSXM38
images). So it is either the cable (possible as two pins were bent and
needed to be straightened) or the controller (also a maybe, been 20
years I might have another spare somewhere around here). I'll order
some
DeOXit, ohm out the first cable to see if it's bad, and try again next
weekend.
Never dull. On the positive side I saved at least one set of RL02
rails.
So there is that.
C
On 11/22/2019 2:36 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
>
>
> On 11/22/19 11:16 AM, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:
>> That
>> could be a problem if I want to re-load Cobol 81 onto this
RSTS/E system.
>
> weren't RL01s usable in an RL02?
>
>
