There's a problem with the floppy interface. This in fact has probably been the case for some time. During this recent testing period, this second E01S has only ever recognised the disc in drive 5. I originally thought this was likely to be because both discs had the same disc name, so the FileStore was ignoring drive 4 when it found an identically named disc in drive 5, instead of falling over completely like the L3 file server does.
On trying to rename a disc using FSNAMEDISC, I kept getting a Bad user name error which made no sense. The FileStore/L3 error code list says this is something to do with the passwords file having corrupt data, so I tried to rename Passwords on disc 4 to PW2. The file disappeared completely! After that, the disc became unusable.
Further testing shows that the problem is with the spin up time of the drives. Any attempt at access from an idle drive gives a disc fault error. This is the same with different drive cables, powering the drives externally, or using different drives. A second attempt to access the disc whilst the drive motor is still running is successful.
So I think what has been happening for some time is that at power on, it tries to mount drive 4, but as this is from the drive being idle, it results in a disc fault, so drive 4 is ignored, and then it looks at drive 5. As the motors are still spinning when it switches to drive 5, it's successful, so the FileStore starts with only drive 5 available.
I used the test suite to test the floppy interface:RTC pin 23 looks to show a frequency of about 10KHz if I've measured it right:This would be 10 times the speed it should be, but roughly equates to the RTC doing about 10 seconds to the second, so it may be right.
FDC pin 16 looks about right, just about within tolerance:So it does seem that the erratic clock is affecting the floppy disc performance if these tests are to be believed, and the clock will have to be fixed if I am to get this FileStore working again.
The similar erratic clock on the first E01S didn't affect floppy disc performance that I noticed however.
On trying to rename a disc using FSNAMEDISC, I kept getting a Bad user name error which made no sense. The FileStore/L3 error code list says this is something to do with the passwords file having corrupt data, so I tried to rename Passwords on disc 4 to PW2. The file disappeared completely! After that, the disc became unusable.
Further testing shows that the problem is with the spin up time of the drives. Any attempt at access from an idle drive gives a disc fault error. This is the same with different drive cables, powering the drives externally, or using different drives. A second attempt to access the disc whilst the drive motor is still running is successful.
So I think what has been happening for some time is that at power on, it tries to mount drive 4, but as this is from the drive being idle, it results in a disc fault, so drive 4 is ignored, and then it looks at drive 5. As the motors are still spinning when it switches to drive 5, it's successful, so the FileStore starts with only drive 5 available.
I used the test suite to test the floppy interface:RTC pin 23 looks to show a frequency of about 10KHz if I've measured it right:This would be 10 times the speed it should be, but roughly equates to the RTC doing about 10 seconds to the second, so it may be right.
FDC pin 16 looks about right, just about within tolerance:So it does seem that the erratic clock is affecting the floppy disc performance if these tests are to be believed, and the clock will have to be fixed if I am to get this FileStore working again.
The similar erratic clock on the first E01S didn't affect floppy disc performance that I noticed however.
Statistics: Posted by BeebMaster — Wed Oct 23, 2024 12:04 am