TK50 tribulations

[Steve Maddison]

Hi all,

I recently dug out a TK50 I was tinkering with before and am having
some trouble diagnosing what's up with it. It arrived with a tape
stuck in it, but I've since managed to persuade that out and a good
clean up had it loading and ejecting properly. Now any read or write
just results in a bit of shoeshining, whereafter it goes into its
light-show routine. Yes, I should probably just admit defeat and keep
it for parts, but it seems so close to working I thought I'd take
another stab.

The technical manual lists all manner of error codes which should
narrow things down. I'm however at a loss as to how one should extract
them from the drive/controller. I've had it hooked up to a PDP-11 and
XXDP said nothing more than that the drive was faulty. I also have a
MicroVAX II (where it actually came from) but I've not been able to
run diagnostics on there due to lack of a floppy drive. I did
experiment with an RX33, some RX50 images and a PC to write them, but
the MicroVAX doesn't want to boot them.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Maddison
http://www.cosam.org/