https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/20 ... -23-part-1
At the end of that workshop, we'd given everything a general cleaning, spun up the disk, found a failed motor start relay, fixed several faults on the Shugart SA-4008 drive itself, found some various issues in cabling and whatnot, and were having issues actually getting data off the drive and into the OSI. Mark Spankus had given Crawford a customized C3DUMP that he was pretty sure would talk to the CD-23, and it seemed to be seeking the drive, but not pulling data off.
This past weekend, we got together again at System Source to try and nail down remaining issues and get data off the drive. I cleaned the 590 and 594 boards at the shop, after the previous attempt, and found several chips that left their legs in sockets (8-10 chips IIRC). We were hoping that was most of the issue, since we'd been chasing intermittent faults on the 590 board.
Everything still worked, or appeared to. My 525 dual-port RAM board failed in the middle of troubleshooting! Bill Dromgoole had a spare that he gave me, which passed the OSI memory test, and that got us actually reading real data! We read the first few blocks twice and compared, and they were the same. We also checked that the blocks were actually different, and not just the same garbage coming off. The C3DUMP program still spits out a HD ERROR #8 but we're not sure if that's a real error or just an artifact of having not been tested on a real CD-23 system until now. The machine still doesn't boot, but that may also be a ROM issue -- I changed ROMs during the troubleshooting of the 510C board in the system.
We're 100% sure that some real data is coming off, as we converted the 2 MB or so we were able to recover in the available time to binary, then ran `strings` on it, and found some obvious FORTH source code, OS messages, etc. There's no way random data coming off the drive would've looked like valid FORTH code -- Perl, maybe
