Making progress with RL02 Drives
I have managed to get the RL02 drive to talk to the controller without a terminator by keeping the cable incredibly short (about 15cm).
It seems I can read the control status register (CSR):
C D E D C I E F D
O R R R N N X U R
M I R I T T T N I
P V O V R E E C V
E R E L R N T E
E R S I
R E C S R U I O R
R R O E D P O N D
R D L Y T N Y
1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0
I have added some headers to these so I can refer back to it later. The drive ready bit (LSB) changes between 0 and 1 depending on whether I have the load button pressed on the drive.
I'm not sure why the composite error and drive error flags are active. If I had to take a guess it was because of what I describe next.
VTserver is compiled and connected up to the PDP-11. I have it set to bootstrap itself and then run the copy program, which it also has to copy to memory first. This was surprisingly easy and only took a few minutes.
However, I want to copy from the RL02 drive to make a dump of the drive, but doing so results in something like this:
Enter name of input record/device: rl(0,0,0)
Can't get rl(0,0,0) sts
rl(0,0,0) err cy=0, hd=0, sc=2, rlcs=142205, rlmp=0
rl(0,0,0) error reading labelsector
Enter name of input record/device:
As you can see, it doesn't seem to happy about reading from the drive. So, I need to figure out whether this is an issue with the controller in the PDP-11 or the RL02 drive itself. I have a couple of spare logic boards for the RL02 drives, so perhaps I can try quickly swapping one out to see what happens.
Related posts:
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Comments and feedback are welcome by email (aaron@nospam-aaronsplace.co.uk).