winvicta@yahoo.com wrote:
> First of all a thank-you to all of you who replied to my earlier post
> on formatting an RD53. I've made some progress and run into another
> problem. I've found an XXDP disk which has ZRQCF0 on it. Using this
> disk, I obtained the following system information:
>
> Micro PDP-11/23-CPU
> Q-Bus system
> 256K words of memory
> MSVII parity memory
> FP-floating point
> CLK 177546/100
> RQDX3 172150/154 DU0:=RX33, DU1:=RX50, DU2:=RX50
> DZV11 160100/310
>
> There you can see the RD53 is recognized by the system as RX33. The
> hard disk controller is M7555. The RD53 is connected to "J7 Fixed Disk
> 0". If I disconnect the RD53, I would see
>
> RQDX3 172150/154 DU0:=RX50, DU2:=RX50
>
> Does this mean the RD53 was not configured properly? From the back of
> the RD53 I can see a couple jumpers. Do you know what the jumber
> configurations should be? This hard disk crashed and was rebuilt. I'm
> now trying to format it.

I'm not familiar with the PDP-11 diagnostics, but it sounds like the
drive was reformatted by a PC house and that the DEC specific
information has not been written to it. In particular, it has a bad
MediaID.

See if the formatter correctly recognizes it. If it does, it should
write the correct information to the drive and you should be set.

One other thing: If the company that rebuilt the drive replaced the
controller board, they may have put a stock Micropolis 1325 board on
instead of the DEC (1325D) version. There is a place on the board
marked R7. On a Micropolis board, this is empty. On a DEC board, it
should have a zero ohm resistor, i.e., a jumper. At least on a MicroVAX
2000, this jumper is necessary for the drive to be recognized by the
diagnostics.

Good luck!

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Scheers, Applied Synergy, Inc.

Voice: 817-237-3360 Internet: chris@applied-synergy.com
Fax: 817-237-3074

In vmsnet.pdp-11 Chris Scheers wrote:
> winvicta@yahoo.com wrote:
>> First of all a thank-you to all of you who replied to my earlier post
>> on formatting an RD53. I've made some progress and run into another
>> problem. I've found an XXDP disk which has ZRQCF0 on it. Using this
>> disk, I obtained the following system information:
>>
>> Micro PDP-11/23-CPU
>> Q-Bus system
>> 256K words of memory
>> MSVII parity memory
>> FP-floating point
>> CLK 177546/100
>> RQDX3 172150/154 DU0:=RX33, DU1:=RX50, DU2:=RX50
>> DZV11 160100/310
>>
>> There you can see the RD53 is recognized by the system as RX33. The
>> hard disk controller is M7555. The RD53 is connected to "J7 Fixed Disk
>> 0". If I disconnect the RD53, I would see
>>
>> RQDX3 172150/154 DU0:=RX50, DU2:=RX50
>>
>> Does this mean the RD53 was not configured properly? From the back of
>> the RD53 I can see a couple jumpers. Do you know what the jumber
>> configurations should be? This hard disk crashed and was rebuilt. I'm
>> now trying to format it.

> I'm not familiar with the PDP-11 diagnostics, but it sounds like the
> drive was reformatted by a PC house and that the DEC specific
> information has not been written to it. In particular, it has a bad
> MediaID.

> See if the formatter correctly recognizes it. If it does, it should
> write the correct information to the drive and you should be set.

Here is how I setup an RX50 floppy, with the programs required to
format a RD31 drive.

http://www.ba23.org/page0204.html#xxdprx50

--
Kirk Russell http://www.ba23.org/
Bridlewood Software Testers Guild Ottawa Ontario Canada