11 Jan
2007
11 Jan
'07
9:58 p.m.
"Joshua Alexander Dersch" wrote:
Huh. I did the same exact thing with zrqch0 (many, many, many times, with
many different variations of options on a wide swath of drives). I could
get the format to complete without errors (supposedly) but I was unable to
use the drive afterwards (couldn't make partitions or create filesystems for
2.11BSD, for example).
Maybe it's just something wrong with my setup. At any rate, I'd love to see
the logs of your attempts to see if I'm perhaps doing something incorrectly.
Well, I used my SMT hot air gun and pulled a few DC005's off a spare
board (it worked pretty well - just never thought to use it for
through-hole). I put the DC005 in the dead RQDX3 and it appears to work
fine.
With that I was able to try formatting an ST-225 with V2 firmware and V4
firmware. They both worked. I was able to install RT-11 and boot from
the drive (I plan to try rsts next, which is has been my goal for a
while).
So it wasn't firmware - it was operator error :-)
I put the log of formatting with zrqch0 here:
http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/pdp11/formatting.txt
I think my problem is that I got fixated on "autoformatting". This
turned out to be wrong (probably works fine for an drive which already
has an FCT but not for a drive used ina pc).
If I had a big enough MFM drive I'd try BSD but the biggest MFM I have
is 20mb. All my larger drives are ESDI. RSTS should work on a 20mb
drive... he said... crossing his fingers (and remembering it ran on
2x RK05's at long ago... :-)
-brad