7 Aug
2007
7 Aug
'07
3:47 p.m.
Well, I made it a bit farther with the MicroVax II.
Right now I am concentrating on just one of the
machines - the MVII in the third party enclosure. It
has a Dilog ESDI card, and a TK50 controller/drive,
and an SMD controller.
A little background:
When I got the machine, the SMD controller was ripped
loose from it's slot (no bulkhead, just cables running
out the back, apparently), and there was a grant card
loose in the bottom of the cabinet. There was a full
horizontal row of slots between the CPU/RAM/SMD and
the ESDI controller and TK50.
Running it like that wasn't going to work, since the
bus grant wasn't going to be passed through the empty
slot. (I know that much about Qbus). So I shifted the
ESDI board and the TK50 board up a row, so there were
no gaps. The ESDI controller never worked like this. I
had to pull out the TK50 controller and put the ESDI
controller in it's place in order to get it to boot.
So maybe the TK50 controller wasn't passing the grant?
Anyway, the drive that was in it makes a horrible
squealing noise, but I left it connected anyway -
since I know the controller was originally using it.
And lo and behold - it booted. VMS version 5.2. I was
able to punch in the date/time, then it loaded some
stuff, then complained of all manner or I/O errors.
Since there's nothing dragging on the spindle of the
drive external to the HDA, it sounds like a head
crash. Bummer.
I got the controller to see and format an IBM ESDI
drive, and that seems to be working. Now, the only
thing I have left to do is load an OS. I'm going to
start with NetBSD since it's easy to get and well
documented. I did some digging here and found my SCSI
TK50 drive. So, I should be able to write a tape, move
it to the MicroVax and boot it. Only one problem. I
don't have any tapes.
The tape I unjammed from another TK50 drive is clearly
not going to work again - the tape was snarled inside
the cartridge (the cartridge is kinda "crinkly" when
you press gently on the poker chip on the bottom. So,
while I know it's not good from a reliability
standpoint, has anyone ever filed the tabs off of an
incompatible cartridge and gotten it to work in a
TK50? I have DLT III, IIIXT and IV cartridges
(although I actually use the IV's - so I don't really
want to go hacking one of those up if I can avoid it).
-Ian