when attempting to mount the hd (boot from flop):

** Disk Error: DiskIO: Failure on READ
    Error is: -7 = Address Error
    Address is 10290. HardDisk Cylinder 86. head 0, sector 0

Aborted at 113 in routine 27 in SYSTEM
Called from 3587 in routine 0 in EXCEPT.
137 19 diskio
358 0 except
457 25 volumesy
33 13  volumesy
241 5 diskio
227 8 readdisk
13 0 readdisk
157 1 allocdis
5 8 filesyst
642 in routine DOMNTDDISMOUNT (13) in SHELL.
1312 SHELL (0) in SHELL
270 0 LOADER.
236 1 SYSTEM
1086 0 SYSTEM.

Debug [No]

Another attempt resulted in:
Device # 0  Device name: Sys
             [garbled chars]: Start =    19686  End  =     37718     Free =

Overflow in conversion Long Integer ==> Integer  
[abort messages]

** Disk Error: DiskIO: Failure on READ
    Error is: -27 = Time out error
    Address is 10290.  HardDisk: Cylinder 86, head 0, sector 0

Waiting for IO...

[nothing happened for a long  time, so, I rebooted it
and waited the usual l...o...n...g time for it to boot again from
the floppy.  Does anyone know if any FastBoot floppies for a PERQ-1,
more specifically running POS G.2, exist?]

The DDS stopped at 394.

Rebooting it again...

Pressing reboot button, waiting to press shift-A...

Let's see, what's a 394 error mean...

"LocateDskHeads entered, about to search for track zero"

Darn... stuck on 394 again. :-(

--
R. D. Davis 410-744-4900  Beware & halt the National Animal ID System (NAIS)!
www.rddavis.org             http://nonais.org  http://www.libertyark.org
www.danglingspiders.com   http://www.rddavis.org/equitation/freedom-vs-id.html
Dangling Spiders Electronic Music Studio       http://www.stopanimalid.org

...

Those sound suspiciously like errors that a 'non-destructive reformat'
procedure might cure?  If you can at least boot from floppy, that drive
sounds like it might be salvageable...

Does anyone actually know what the differences are between the normal
boot floppy and the "fast" boot floppy?  Why on earth would anyone sit
through the slow boot once they devised the faster method?  It's the
difference between about 45-60 seconds and 10+ minutes!  Oy!

Rats!  That sounds like what I've been getting - a 153, the "Hard disk
restore failure", only your machine is at least attempting to start up
POS, whereas mine is still dying (it appears) in SYSB.

I've powered up both of my PERQ-1As this weekend, and sadly, neither
will boot.  I'm thrilled that the hardware is alive - nothing exploding
or making bad smells, sparks, or nasty sounds - but neither machine
will boot.

The first unit at least tries, then halts in the 153-158 range.  This
is the IOB with v10.17 of the Z80 code, and a 2MB portrait with G.6/S6
on the disk.  At least this machine appears to be able to seek either
drive and read in the bootstrap, but the IOB or Z80(?) is failing to
allow the OS to start up.

The second unit, with a similar config but IOB Z80 version 8.7, stops
at 010 and won't get past that with either drive.

Upon visual inspection, I'm concerned that the boards themselves may be
breaking down!!?  This is highly disconcerting... I may gently lay one
on my flatbed scanner and post a high-res image to show what I mean...

Considering that all of the magnetic media here - floppy discs, the
Shugart discs, even the PAL and PROM chips - is approaching 25 years
old, is it possible that simply due to their age, these components may
just not be usable anymore, even if (in the case of the rotating
storage) the mechanical parts still work?  I have, I think, at least
one replacement set of Shugart boards, but I really think the IOB or
the Z80 subsystem in particular - the only thing common in the errors
I'm getting - is at fault.  Damn.  I need _one_ of my PERQs to run so
that I can try to diagnose and fix the T2 memory parity problems and
get my streamer working... I have OIO boards available; I could
potentially try to use ODTPRQ to download memory tests directly into
the WCS of my T2 in order to diagnose that box.  But if both PERQ 1's
are failing, then I'm completely screwed. :-(  Well, unless I can go
find a PDP-11 that works, and... :-)

Anyone got a spare PERQ-1 IOB with v10.17 Z80 PROMs laying around?  Or,
does anyone have a burner who could attempt to read in and duplicate a
new set for me, on the very off chance that this is part of the
problem?

I'm going to be very, very sad if all three of my PERQs are no longer
bootable...

-- Chris

I can't say for sure what the difference between a normal and fast boot
floppy is (since I only have a normal boot floppy to work with).  But
I'd wager that the reason the normal boot floppy is so slow is that it
is extremely conservative with floppy disk accesses -- the boot code in
SYSB appears to use very long wait loops (counting down from 77777,
which takes .7 sec if I recall) between every floppy sector transfer.
SYSB reads ~40 cylinders worth of data (at least on the floppies I have)
which is around 1000 sectors, so the delays add up to about 700 seconds
on a real machine.

I ran into this while coding my emulator -- floppy booting took
approximately 15 minutes (no, the emulator code is not optimized at all
yet) which made testing changes very tedious; I added code to detect and
skip the loops in the boot code and now booting the emulator from floppy
takes ~4 seconds.

I'd bet that the only difference between a "normal" and a "fast" boot
floppy is that the "fast" boot waits a significantly shorter time
between floppy transfers.

If anyone has an image of a "fast" boot & run floppy for a PERQ1, I'd
love to see it.  Then I might be able to tell you for sure what the
difference is :).

Josh

Actually, now that I think on it a bit more, it may be that the "fast"
boot floppies use DMA transfers (which I believe were only available for
  floppy devices on PERQ 2's).  Of course, if there are fast boot
floppies out there for a PERQ 1, that would disprove that theory...

Josh