On Sat, 18 Jun 2005, Philipp Hachtmann wrote: You're very lucky! Even though you are not having a problem now, I would spend $50 on real cleaning materials. Here's what I suggest (others will suggest other things). Mail order this stuff, you're unlikely to find it retail (though Fry's Electronics here in Fornicalia carries some of this stuff): * 99% anhydrous alcohol -- NOT drug-store alcohol. About $7/quart * KIM wipes or equiv 100% lint free bonded/tangle-weave wipes. $10 * Nylon-covered, fat foam swabs on sticks. $5/$10 * Craft sticks $5 * Disposable nylon gloves $? * can of "air" (photo supply store) $10 (The gloves I was never able to find less than 1000 quantity; I used non-powdered 8-mil latex, and washed them with alcohol/kimwipes after I put them on. However flawed, it's gotta beat oily finger prints. Cotton gloves are lint generators, might as well use dryer lint.) You need to clean the platters of the GOOD disks, before the become CRASHED disks. Here's how I did it: Before you start prep first. It takes 3 - 5 minutes. Using window cleaner or other simple cleaner, wipe off the exterior of the disk drive, disk pack, the table or whatever you will work on, and wash all you tools. Clean everything you'll be touching or will be near. NO DUST. Lay a few sheets of clean, unused paper on the table. If you end up with something delicate in your hand you'll ahve a place to put it. The alternative is juggling or dropping it. (This is a car trick but it's cheap and easy.) Get access to a pack. With gloved hands, dampen folded kimwipes (alcohol) and wipe gently the parts you can reach. For hard-to reach use the swabs, or wrap 2 - 3 kimwipes on a craft stick, tie a cut strip of kimwipe to hold it on, pour alcohol on it, and wipe the platter surface. Obviously I'm assuming you've wrapped it such that there's no danger of wood rubbing on the platter, only kimwipe. Repeat until the kimwipe is SPOTLESS WHITE. Shine a bright! light down the platter edgewise; look hard for lint standing up. If rare, blow 'em off with canned air. If "many" clean again. Repeat until spotless. Clean the heads again; on my DG drive I found the kimwipe-on-craft-stick thing worked great. Mount the platter, find the switch that disables head load (it iwll have one; I had to disassemble the drive cabinet to expose the guts and flip the switch.) With head load disabled, and assuming the disk filter is clean, power up and spin up the drive. Data General suggest ONE FULL HOUR of purge (as they call it). THe platter is spinning at 1800 rpm or so, there's a dozen specks of dust on there you'll never find. If the platter is otherwise clean and not sticky (the reason for all the alcohol!) it'll fling off in that hour.

On 6/18/05, Philipp Hachtmann <hachti at hachti.de> wrote: I did say not to mount a pack that had crashed... that's completely expected. Yes. It's a non-system boot block. There are several techniques... if you are trying to load, say, 2BSD, there's vtserver. If you are trying to run an RT-11 system, you can hook up a PC to a serial port _other than the console_ and fire up a TU58 emulator on the PC and boot _that_ on the PDP-11 (DD). As others have suggested, the one that's low-effort is to locate/buy/etc/ a Qbus MSCP controller - $200 to $250 might do it, and use something like a ZIP drive. You could load it up on a PC, then stick it on the PDP-11 and boot DU and there you are. Most PDP-11 operating systems you'll probably want to play with were not loaded from paper tape like the PDP-8 was in the 1960s - I know you can build OS/8 from paper tape. I doubt it was ever done with RT-11. Most folks by that era had some sort of mass storage. On the low end, that was TU58 or RX01. If you had a few grand, you could move up to an RK05 or RL01 (2MB-5MB). When I got into PDP-8s and PDP-11s, c. 1982-1984, the RL02 cost more than my car, so I had to content myself with lower-capacity devices. Dunno what's up with your Emulex controller. Never had one. It's possible that whatever software was on there once has been corrupted. It should take seconds to boot (or nearly instantaneously to see the first messages). If I had a system device that sat and blinked lights for 10 minutes, I'd be looking for a way to mount it on a known good system as a data disk and start poking around. -ethan