RL02K Pack Reliability/Characteristics

[Ethan Dicks]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 11:26 PM, Christopher Parish
<christopher.parish at parishcomputers.com> wrote:
> Thanks for your help everyone.  I finally figured out what was happening.  Something is wrong with my (everyone's?) drives.
> ...this could be totally normal, and the controllers/software drivers hide it.

I'd have to dig out driver code (perhaps rl.c from 2BSD would be the
quickest to read and digest if you already know C) but IIRC, yes...
all the drivers "hide this" because that's what the drives do.  I
don't know chapter and verse about how they handle multiple 1-track
seek fails (the OS/8 RL8A driver probably has the least room for fancy
footwork), but they should all handle this to one degree or another.

I'm very interested in this.  I have a *lot* of packs to image and it
would be nice to not have to run them across a serial port or to dump
them on a real MicroVAX or Unibus VAX and transport the images off of
that.

I look forward to your continued success!

-ethan