Hi !

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, der Mouse wrote:
> But those controllers connect to a breakout board which is placed
> outside the usual Q-bus enclosure, in a slot marked "13".  And it's not
> just for physical mounting; there are a few etch runs to the card edge,
> and some active components on the board.

AFAIK, there are just some power lines on this slot. It really does have no
other function than powering these little TTLs on the distributor cards.

> So I'm asking the collective wisdom of the experts here, can I make
> this work in my skinny case, or do I have to haul one of the fat cases
> home?  Will it work to leave that board not plugged into anything?  To
> plug it into an ordinary Q-bus slot?  What *is* that slot 13?

She "skinny" case has the whole distributor panel included in the case. If you
mean this 19" thing or the BA23, the "front side" of the backplane has the
distributor, connect your 50pin cable there, and go out with the drive
cables. This works fine here. (Ok, currently, the case is abused for a
PDP11/23+ :-)

> The "new" controllers are different; one is a dual-height M7555 and the
> other is a quad-height M8639.  But the breakout boards, which are
> dual-height and have no number on the handles, appear identical, and
> the foil side etch includes the lettering "5016673-01B1 M9058".

I don't know the M8639, it might be some older RQDX-type controller. This might
be a bit incompatible to the RQDX3 (M7555).

> Or are the disks supposed to work regardless of the controller, and
> this indicates that all four "new" drives really are broken?  (Or
> perhaps the cables I was using....)

In the worst case, you have to format them. But if they do nothing at the
moment, check out, if you have ESDI drives connected to a ST506-controller. If
the M8639 is ESDI, you might have trashed something now. The connectors of
ESDI and ST506 are the same, but the signals are very different.

...Michael

-- 
 Michael@unixiron.org, Rottweil/Germany, http://www.bsdfans.org
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