RL drive problems ...?

[Lyle Bickley]

Hi Henk,

On Sunday 18 December 2005 12:59, Gooijen, Henk wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to hear from the specialists what they have to say
> about this problem.
>
> I finally got my 11/34C running again.  It has an RL11 and has
> two RL02 and one RL01 connected. Most of the time I cannot boot
> RT11 from the RL02-DC, but sometimes the boot is successfull!
> If the boot fails, I see the READY lamp of the drive flash once,
> then the RUN light goes off, and the display shows 000004. BTW,
> at the end of the RL drive chain is of course the terminator.

Have you run the XXDP* 11/34A CPU and Memory diagnostics on your system? RT 
will sometimes randomly boot even with a somewhat "sick" CPU or Memory.

After you know the CPU and memory are O.K. then:

Isolate the drives - i.e., connect your RL controller to just one drive (of 
course, terminating the drive. Try this on each drive to insure that one 
drive isn't messing things up for the others.

Finally, if it still won't boot reliably, run the RL02 XXDP* diagnostics.

(* I'm assuming that you have another device capable of running XXDP other 
than the drives you're trying to get up. If not, I've found that XXDP will 
boot "easier" than RT on a "somewhat" sick system)

> The cartridge was written while the system was still in my house
> (some 3 years gao, at some 20" Celcius), but the system is now
> in a 12" Celcius environment.  Could the temperature difference
> make the disk too difficult to read in the nwe conditions?

I doubt that 8 degrees Celsius would make a difference...

> When RT11 runs, and I only do a .DIR command of the disk, is
> there something written to the disk? That could make the disk
> "useless", because of the 20"/12" Celsius issues?

Nothing is written to a disk when you do a DIR on RT. You can insure that your 
disk is not written by setting the write protect switch on (which I always do 
when testing RL0x drives or running non-RL diagnostics).

>  Another problem that I have since I have power for my systems
> is that the READY lamp of the RL01 is *always* ON.
> The FAULT lamp is OK - and is OFF. I have not yet investigated
> this problem, but hints in advance are appreciated :-)
> [would save me some time, to work on the other projects, like
> the floppy disk interface for the 6809 Core Board...]

Well, you've clearly got a "Bug" there - I don't have any "easy" solutions - 
except to check all the switches and logic that that are required to be "set" 
in order to get "ready".

> BTW, the system worked fine, 3 years ago ... it has power since
> a few weeks, and I had a lot of problem getting the 11/34C up
> and running, but that would be a different story too ...
>
>   greetz,
> - Henk, PA8PDP

Cheers,
Lyle
-- 
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
Mountain View, CA
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"