Resurrecting RK05

[Guy Sotomayor]

On 1/11/15 6:36 PM, Rick Bensene wrote:
> This afternoon I got the drive racked up, got the drive select set to drive 1, removed the terminator from drive 0 and plugged in the bus extension cable, routed it to drive 1 and plugged it into the drive.
>
> The second drive already had the terminator it in (nice, I now have a spare).
>
>   I finished routing the cabling and power cable for the second drive, and then powered up the system.    I left it all sit for about 30 minutes before I tried anything.
>
> I noted that there was no LOAD indication showing up on drive 1, so I investigated.   There wasn't any bulb there, so I put one in, and it lit up.
>
> Drive 0 had an OS8 boot pack in it already, and I spun it up, and it went ready just fine (a relief).  I started up my SerialDisk server, and turned off the HALT switch on the 8/e, hit CLEAR, then raised and lowered the SW switch. The machine proceeded to boot using the diode ROM bootstrap for the RK8E.  It booted up just fine, and I was able to access the SerialDisk drive also.
>
> So, I loaded a RK05 pack that I had formatted on drive 0 into drive 1, and flicked the LOAD switch.   Things were quiet for a moment, then I could hear that the pack was spinning up, and shortly thereafter, the drive went ready.
>
>   I did a "DIR RKA1:", and got an empty directory with the appropriate number of free blocks.
>   I then did a "COPY RKA1:<SD0:*.*" (copying everything from the SerialDisk drive 0 to the A side of the new drive), and let it run.  It took a while, but the copy succeeded just fine.  I could run stuff off the new drive just fine after the copy had finished.  Seems all is good.
>
> I did an RKCOPY command and copied the entirety of Drive 0 to Drive 1, with verify turned on, and it copied just fine.
>
> Spun down both drives, and swapped packs, and tried booting, and it succeeded. I was able to read and write files on drive 0 and drive 1 just fine, so the two drives seem (with only a little testing) seem to interchange packs OK.
>
> Thanks to all for the advice and discussion.
Great!

I've found that the RK05 is a pretty bulletproof drive.  The vast 
majority of work that I've done on mine has been to clean the drive from 
disintegrated foam and replacing said foam (BTW I find that garage door 
weather stripping works *really* well for the task).  It usually takes 
me 3-4 hours to go from a completely unknown drive to a working/tested 
drive (cleaning out & replacing the foam is the first step everything 
after that is dependent upon what I find while I'm doing that).

I've worked on about a half dozen drives and they all work flawlessly.  
I have another 8 or so that I haven't done any serious work on yet 
mainly because I haven't had to.  I'll get to them when I'm bored.  ;-)

TTFN - Guy