9 Jan
2007
9 Jan
'07
2:03 p.m.
On 1/9/07, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Did you try inputting the CE unlock code and running
the recalibration? May
help, certainly won't hurt at this point.
After I got a tape to load ok by fiddling with the tach roller for a
while the drive does seem to work. I was able to use a linix machine
to dd the 2.11BSD files to a tape in the 9914, and then used dos
machine to read the tape back from the 9914 into a tap file using st,
then verify that I could boot the tape image into a 2.11BSD
installation using the demo version of Ersatz-11. So it would appear
that the 9914 can write and read a tape now.
On my rollers, the rubber is perfectly fine. I lucked
out I guess.
The rubber on the tach roller on my 9914 might have been ok if I
didn't start rotating the roller for a while with my finger to see if
I could get it to rotately more freely.
Now that the rubber goo has been removed, I wonder if that has changed
the diameter enough that the linear tape speed is different enough to
cause interchange issues with tape written on other drives. Or is
that not an issue? Is the timing information recovered from the data
on the tape regardless of the tape speed, within reasonable
tolerances?
I still would like to know if I should lubricate the tach roller
somehow, and re-rubber it somehow.
But now I'm stumped on getting a real 11/73 box to boot from the
2.11BSD tape on the 9914 drive. Does anyone have a manual for the
Dilog SQ703, or has anyone got one running in one of their systems?
That's what I'm trying to use to connect the 9914 to the 11/73 box
without much luck in trying to boot from the tape. This is the first
time I have tried doing anything with a real 11/73 box so I'm new to
this all around.
Has anyone used a 9914 drive through the Pertec interface instead of
the SCSI interface? It appears you could do that by removing the SCSI
interface board and the access covers over the Pertec connectors in
the back of the drive. I have a DQ142 (anyone have manuals for that?
DU142 is on bitsavers, DQ142 is not) and wonder if that might be
workable alternative to using the SQ703 with the 9914 if I can come up
with some cables to hook the two together.
-Glen