Qbus
Veteran Member
Bad weekend, managed to blow the directory on the one good RL-01 disk that I have, Kill my RX-02 drive and had a RL drive die. The weekend started out good, received a RX-01 and bunch of other stuff to add to the 11/34 and decided that I would try to build a new RT-11 system disk for that system on an old RL-01 disk that had useless data on it. So I went and initialized the drive but that took off and never finished, so I interrupted the system and then discovered that what I started initialize was not a disk with useless information on it but my RT-11 system disk. Then after a half hour or so of trying to build a new system disk on DL0: my RX-02 decided to die. Don’t know if the heads clogged or what but noticed that I don’t hear anything when I tell the system to boot from DY, going to try cleaning the heads tonight and see if that makes any difference. There are a couple problems that I have (other than being an idiot) that I would like opinions on. First anytime I have attempted to write to the RL drive there has always been some sort of issue. Do not know if it’s a problem with the recording side of the drive or just because I don’t know what I am doing. Back before I blew the system drive I was able to boot from the RL drive, do things like format drives in the DY, copy files or entire disks from DY0 to DY1 with no issues and all that sort of stuff but always had some issues trying to copy files to the DL drive. Would have thought all you have to do is something like COPY DY0: *.* DL0: and it will copy the contents of the RX floppy over to the directory on DL0: the RL drive. If I assign DL as :VOL or :DK did not make a difference. Can there be something wrong with my RV controller for the RL drive? Have three different RL-01 drives and they all done the same thing so don’t think it’s an issues with the drives themselves. Second, what the proper way to build a bootable drive? After initializing or formatting blank media do you copy the system drive to the new drive? Do you then do COPY/SYS? Or COPY/ BOOT? And where does this SYSGEN stuff come in? Before I lost my floppy did do a copy of the RT-11 disk that was in drive 0 to drive one but although it did copy it would not boot but think that’s because I did not then do the COPY/Boot thing, something about setting up the first five blocks or something like that. And finally was it possible that the reason when I was initializing my RL-01 (DL0) it never finished was because I did not use the appropriate switch after that for marking bad, replace or volume? Or is it just that my drive controller on that system sucks?
