Some progress with my PDP-11/73 system - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

10 Apr 2007

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Subject: Re: Some progress with my PDP-11/73 system
   From: David Betz <dbetz at xlisper.com>
   Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 08:58:01 -0400
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>

   I
soldered it back together but both drives still fail. At least  
 one of the drives spins up but then back down again. 
 That can happen if the heads are stuck against the end stop inside  
 the drive.  There's a rubber bumper that goes sticky.  Alison  
 posted more information about that just a few days ago. 
Yes, I saw those messages. At this point I'm not up for opening up  
the drive to attempt a fix though. I guess if one of my good ones  
stops working I may change my mind. Instead, I'm starting to look  
into what is necessary for a minimal RT-11 bootable RX50 diskette.  
Unfortunately, that's the only medium I have for moving things to the  
hard drive on the PDP-11. 
To boot a floppy under RT-11 is fairly easy.  You will need a bootable
disk, That is a copy of RT-11 with the bootdevice you plan to use configured.
It also must have the hard disk driver as well and basic utilities.  RT-11
fits on small devices (even tu58 256kB).

FYI: an option is to use TU-58 emulator on a PC and a serial line to
a PDP-11 as a fairly straight forward way to get stuff on a an -11
with blank media.  At the extreme the DD boot can be hand entered 
into uODT as its something like 30 words long.  I know I used to boot
a romless 11/23 that way.

Allison