jackrubin
Veteran Member
I've now get an apparently fully functioning RX01 system attached to my 8/M. Thanks to Mike Thompson's diagnostics, I was able to sort out a working controller and drive unit. I have one bad controller with interrupt problems and one functional one. I also have a couple sets of RX01 drives, one with socketed ROMs that seems to work quite well and one with soldered ROMs that doesn't respond to controller input in any noticeable way. At this point, I just married the two functional items and came up with a working system. The first part of Mike's diagnostics (controller only) were very helpful; connecting the drives made things much more confusing but eventually I realized that the actual floppy disks were causing more problems than the drives or controllers. I finally unearthed a stack of blank formatted disks that had been set aside for RT11 backups and found a couple good ones for testing (out of 10).
I was able to use Dave Gesswein's RESTRX01 program to write some RX01 images to disk. Each drive successfully was able to recreate an image. Several disks failed during the REST process with either write failures or retry timeouts. In each case, the PDP8 halted but the PC just kept pumping out sectors until I interrupted it. For the disks that completed the process, I was able to read the directories but I haven't yet attempted to run programs or boot from the disks. I've been using an MI8E (diode boot card) coded for Kyle Owen's SerialDisk and it (the boot board) has started to go flakey so I need to deal with that before continuing.
Quick question for other users of DUMPREST - on the successful restores, the PC program writes "Done" to the console after the last track is written and immediately before exiting. Following "Done" is something about parity but the message flashes by so quickly that I've been unable to read it. I've looked at Dave's code and don't see a matching phrase anywhere in the listing (unless it is in one of the included libraries?). Has anyone else seen this message and been able to read it? I'm using his precompiled executable under Windows XP.
I'll be digging out my ImageDisk system with FDADAP to format and image more RX01 disks rather than beat on the DEC drives. Does anyone know if the RX01 format used a different fill character than the CP/M format? The first disks I tried for testing were old CP/M disks and they gave some pretty bizarre errors that I didn't see with the RT11 formated disks.
More in a day or two when I actually try booting off the disks.
Jack
I was able to use Dave Gesswein's RESTRX01 program to write some RX01 images to disk. Each drive successfully was able to recreate an image. Several disks failed during the REST process with either write failures or retry timeouts. In each case, the PDP8 halted but the PC just kept pumping out sectors until I interrupted it. For the disks that completed the process, I was able to read the directories but I haven't yet attempted to run programs or boot from the disks. I've been using an MI8E (diode boot card) coded for Kyle Owen's SerialDisk and it (the boot board) has started to go flakey so I need to deal with that before continuing.
Quick question for other users of DUMPREST - on the successful restores, the PC program writes "Done" to the console after the last track is written and immediately before exiting. Following "Done" is something about parity but the message flashes by so quickly that I've been unable to read it. I've looked at Dave's code and don't see a matching phrase anywhere in the listing (unless it is in one of the included libraries?). Has anyone else seen this message and been able to read it? I'm using his precompiled executable under Windows XP.
I'll be digging out my ImageDisk system with FDADAP to format and image more RX01 disks rather than beat on the DEC drives. Does anyone know if the RX01 format used a different fill character than the CP/M format? The first disks I tried for testing were old CP/M disks and they gave some pretty bizarre errors that I didn't see with the RT11 formated disks.
More in a day or two when I actually try booting off the disks.
Jack
