DEC RL01/02, RK05/06/07 Cartridge Inspector/Cleaner

On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 03:22:31PM -0400, Ashley Carder wrote: Several, though as I mentioned earlier, only one has been used in the past couple of years. I have an as-yet-unused-by-me RK8E and one RK05J-16 pack, and a couple of RK11s (one RKV11D, a couple of RK11Ds, and an RK11C) each with at least one drive and stacks of RK05J-12s, mostly with copies of RT-11 and ancient university data sets on them. More or less - new foam, new filter, new NiCd batteries, and a through cleaning. I did get to process two *pallets* of drives for a former employer (c. 1988) and recover as many working drives from the pile as possible. I think my boss told me that four drives would be considered good work, and I gave him six. Besides head crashes (these were as-is drives), the most common actual failure mode was burned-out lightbulbs in the optical positioner feedback circuit. It was easy enough to check them... open up the service panels and see if there's a light on the glass scale by the heads... no light == bad. They were some bizarre bulb assembly that we didn't bother trying to find replacements for - we just robbed them from drives that were in worse shape (dents, smashed doors, etc). If you only have one "dead" drive, I'm not sure how you'd get replacement parts, but my experience is that unless you know the drive has had something catastrophic happen to it, it probably only needs a severe cleaning and a PM on the batteries, foam, etc. That having been said, though, I wouldn't mount a critical pack first. Always mount a scratch monkey! -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 05-May-2004 21:40 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -81.4 F (-63.0 C) Windchill -122 F (-85.59 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 8.69 kts Grid 050 Barometer 675.4 mb (10800. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html