[pups] Reformat RA81/82?

[Gregory R. Travis]

Can RA81/82 disks be reformatted in the field?  If so, is this
done through XXDP or is there a way to do it from the disk's
serial port?

My RA82 occasionally lights its FAULT light and extinguishes its
ready light during write operations.  The likelyhood of it
faulting appears (but I am not certain) to be correlated with a specific
region of the disk.

About five-ten seconds after the fault, the FAULT indicator turns
off and ready comes back on.  At no time is an I/O error generated
that the application or the operating system (2.11BSD) see
so this fault appears to be transient and is resolved by either
the drive or the drive/controller together.

It "smells" like a data write error that's resolved after a few
automatic retries.  I'm hoping a low-level reformat could clear it
up.  Am I wacked out?

If there's an XXDP exerciser/formatter available I'd appreciate it
if someone could point me there.  It's been nearly twenty years since
the last time I even tried running XXDP

Thanks as always,

greg

p.s.  The RA81 drive on the same controller never gives any
trouble (yet).  I've tried some more basic things like
swapping SDI cables and drive ports but it doesn't make
a difference.

Gregory Travis
Cornerstone Information Systems ATS
greg at ciswired.com
812 330 4361 ext. 18