RL02 Question

[Aaron Jackson]

>>>>>> So, from what I can see, the drive should spin up correctly, but for
>>>>>> some reason it goes into fault mode. I am right in thinking that upon
>>>>>> load, the heads should continue moving forward until the first track is
>>>>>> found, right? I should not have to perform a seek manually from the PDP?
>>>>>> If this is not the case, perhaps there is something else wrong.
>>>>> I’m not an RL02 hardware expert at all, just a daily user back in the
>>>>> day. I’m reading this assuming that at all times the drive is
>>>>> correctly hooked up to an RLV12 in a running PDP with the correct
>>>>> cable and termination present on the drive? If it isn’t you’ll get a
>>>>> fault condition instead of ready after spin up.
>>>>>
>>>>> A
>>>> No worries, your input has been valuable, so thank you.
>>>>
>>>> For anyone else who might have an idea:
>>> ON fault the heads are retracted and will not load till cleared.
>>> Least mine behaves that way.
>>>
>>> Most common problems are wrong drive address, cable issues, no terminator.
>>> Others include head lock not removed or the auto unlock style of
>>> headlock has
>>> the tab broken.
>>>
>>>> It seems to be hooked up correctly. When it is in the weird flashing
>>>> ready state, the boot loader says "Read error" or "Device error"
>>>> randomly. The heads oscillate back and forth very slightly as if it is
>>>> trying to align itself better on the first track, which doesn't exist
>>>> because it hasn't moved far enough into the pack.
>>> IF in fault its resetting to retracted on every try.
>>> If not something else is wrong.
>>>
>>>> I'm beginning to think the heads are bad which will be far too expensive
>>>> so I may end up giving up.
>>> Heads are not that expensive... However you could have a wrong pack
>>> or one that has been erased and has no servo tracks. You must start with
>>> a known good pack and cleaned heads.
>>>
>>>
>>> Allison
>> Well, I replaced the DOWN head and adjusted the amplitude on the r/w
>> board. The drive now stays in READY without the FAULT lamp coming on, so
>> this is promising. The heads load onto the first track.
>>
>> Without any r/w operations, should the READY light flash? Mine is
>> flashing a little but not too rapidly. I am guessing this is while it
>> tries to keep the heads positioned over the track.
> Yes, normal read/write/seek activity causes that.
>
>> When I try to boot using the MXV11-BF boot roms, it says:
>>
> MXV-11 boot is not very chatty or informative.
>
>> ]] ?BOOTROM-F- DL 0 read error
>>
>> The alignment between the two heads looks okay also.
>>
>> Any ideas, anyone?
>
> Is the OS on it? IF RT-11 is it configured to boot from DL-nn?
> IF you have OS on floppy can your do a dir of the devices it knows of?
>

This occurred to me just after I last replied. Silly me. Ended up
booting into 2.11BSD to see if I could run disklabel on it. No such
luck. I'll try RT-11 later this week. If that doesn't work I'll boot
into XXDP over TU58 and give that ago.

Thanks very much for your help, Allison, and others.

Best,
Aaron.