Good news on my RK05 drives

I tried a DSKINT in RSTS/E. It errors attempting to write, claiming that there's a bad block on track 0 (or sector 0). The disk reads perfectly fine in the other drive, no bad blocks. I wrote a little test program to attempt to read random blocks and I watched the read/write head. It did move in and out like it should. If it was attempting to read a low numbered block, it moved just a little bit. If it was attempting to read a high numbered block, it moved farther toward the center of the platter. However, every attempt to read or write resulted in an error. The head would position to the appropriate(?) position on the disk, sit there a short while, and then move back to cylinder 0. I suppose I could swap boards with the good drive to verify the boards. Any other ideas? I guess that some day soon I'm going to have to learn more low-level technical stuff and how to troubleshoot electronic components (I keep saying that!). - Ashley -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Tony Duell Sent: Monday, July 26, 2004 12:06 AM To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Good news on my RK05 drives I'm not an expert, but... Maybe an alignment problem, maybe soemthing else. What you want to do is take a pack you don't care about the contents of, and attempt to format and verify it in drive 0 (this will erase everything on the pack). If this works, then the problem is radial alignment (head alignment) -- the drive can read/write correctly, but just not in the same place as other drives. If it fails, then there's something else wrong. Maybe head positioning, maybe the read/write board, maybe... You then need to do more troubleshooting, maybe with a'scope, while the drive is formatting/verifying to see just what is going on. -tony