Imaging DEC uVAX MFM drives

[J Blaser]

For the DEC uVAX gurus out there...

[And, first, let me apologize up front for the length of this post, but 
as mostly a list skulker (of about 9 months), and a digest reader, I 
figured I'd toss in as many relevent details as I could.]

Being the fortunate recipient of a nice collection of DEC gear, I've now 
turned my attention to a handful of uVAXen of various flavors.

As I did with the PDP-11 RL cartridges, I'm first trying to image these 
uVAXen disks[1] before I do something stupid.  Please be aware that I'm 
a complete VAX newbie and I consider this imaging a vital CYA insurance 
step to my eventual VAX/VMS/ULTRIX/BSD education.

Since I don't have (at least to my knowledge, yet) a functional VAX that 
might do the trick, I've removed each drive and attached it to a known 
working WD1002-WA2 controller [2] running on a 40Mhz 386 box, with 
Debian Linux.  I'm just using the dd command to image the drive to a 
file, which I'll burn off to a CD when I've got everything imaged.

The reason I'm using such old hardware is a long story [3], but I have 
tested and proved this setup's functionality by imaging three MFM drives 
from old PC-class system.with no difficulty.

Which brings me to the DEC-related drives.

After adjusting the Drive Select (set to drive 2, per IBM's twisted 
cable 'standard') and Write Fault (if extant) jumpers, *none* of the 
DEC-related drives are recognized by my test rig.  I always get a "C: 
drive error / Press <F1> to RESUME" message.  The drive's ready light is 
on, and all looks and sounds normal.

For kicks, if I boot linux and try my dd command, it croaks with this 
type of message:

hda: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hda: read_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound }, CHS=0/0/1, sector 0

I get the same type of results when I use dd's seek=n option to other 
blocks (sectors).

Strangely, it almost appears that there is no low level format on the 
drives, doesn't it?  I'm not smart enough to make that call though, and 
it seems strange that *all three* drives show this same result.  Is it 
possible that the original owner somehow 'bulk erased' the drives?  I 
did, at least, expect to find formating marks.

Is there something I've missed, trying to image these 'DEC' drives?  Did 
I miss some not-so-obvious jumper somewhere (though I diligently 
examined all documentation I could find)?  Surely, they're just good-ol' 
MFM drives, right?

Jared

[1] I'm imaging three different drive types: RD23-A (71MB Micropolis 
1325), RD54 (159MB Maxtor XT-2190), and a Rodime RO-202 11MB drive from 
an AED WINC-08/05 RX01/RL02 emulation system.

[2] Yes, I still have every computer I've ever owned, including two 
AT-class 286 machines made by Novell in the mid 80's.

[3] Attempting to use the WD1002-WA2 in two different and more modern PC 
motherboards with onboard IDE interfaces proved a no go.  Even after 
disabling the IDE controller (both primary and secondary) and the floppy 
controller in the BIOS there were some general flakiness, and I couldn't 
ever get the systems to recognize the MFM controller.