A frustrating evening in vintage computer-land, as you will see. Also
the drive belt popped off my 33ASR during the fun. And Windows
Networking to the old PC I use to run VTserver was initially
nonfunctional as usual, but I digress.
I fired up my PDP-8/A after a long hiatus, and it won't boot OS/8 any
more (on boot, the RL02 immediately flashes its Fault light briefly
but then becomes ready again, and the system halts). The drive seems
to be working without errors at least according to the short test
programs from the user's guide I keyed in - I don't have a diagnostic
pack - but reading the status register shows no error bits set, and
the Oscillating Seek program also runs properly...
Anyhow, I figure that the OS/8 pack might have become corrupted, so I
attempted to reload it on my 11/23+ system (which IS working and
passing memory tests) using VTserver, which is how I created it the
first time.
However, since I last successfully did it, I've upgraded the 11/23+
boot ROMs to the KDF11B-BH V1.0. This is the only hardware change. Not
sure if that has anything to do with the problem, which is:
When attempting to download the disk image, the copy portion of the
program loads (starting at 140000) but won't execute, halting at
140002. I discovered that I had the Halt switch set. If the Halt
switch is NOT set, when execution is supposed to begin, instead the
11/23+ says "ERR 4 MMU ABORT" and also won't accept the incoming disk
image data!
Do I need to go back to the original boot ROM in order to use VTserver
(i.e. is there some change made to ODT that is messing things up?)
Also, does anyone have a paper tape version of the RL02 diagnostics
for PDP-8?
thanks
Charles