RX02 fun and games

I have been beating on my RX02 dual drive. I have the technical manual and the user manual but do not have the schematics. Anyone know where I can download them? I have drive 0 working and have been trying to resolve issues with drive 1 but its complicated lots of little wires and things. If anyone can post a picture of the M7745 read / write board that would be helpful, assuming on drive two the head connects to J6, head 0? Question why their two head connections on J5 are and J6 when there is only one head on each drive? Will the same card work with the double side drives? With one head I am assuming I am doing signal side signal density? Ray F.

You do know about www.bitsavers.org, correct? It should be the first place you go for all things old and DEC.

See:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/disc/rx02/

Don

I have noticed the same thing that Ray has with regard to M7745 appearing to have connections for two heads per drive while there is really only one head. I read somewhere that dec had planned on making (but never did) an RX03 that would have been a double sided RX02. It looks like the M7745 was prepared for this.

Lou

Disk City

Disk City

Think I resolved the RX-02 issue, don’t know why but I have been plugging the head for drive 1 into the connector for head 1 and not head 0. Apparently both heads plug into head 0 on J5 and J6 and after doing this was able to read and write to both drives. It's amazing how well these things work when they are connected correctly.
New question, can you flip the disk over and use the other side?

Qbus said:

New question, can you flip the disk over and use the other side?

Click to expand...

Yes and no. You have to punch extra holes in the jacket - you can't just flip it over. The index hole won't line up. Also, IIRC, the RX02 can't format disks, so you'd have to format the back of the disk in another machine. I think the process is to format the disk as an IBM 3740, then "reformat" in the RX02. That won't actually reformat the disk, just change the data areas from single density to double density.

-Ian

So when I tell the system to "FORMAT DY1:\SIGNELDENSITY" it's just doing a erasing the FAT? I have several disk form unknown sources and have formatted them and when I read the directory it reads the disk and comes back with the very mysterious "ILEAGEL DIRECTORY" have no idea what that means.
Ray