23 Nov
2009
23 Nov
'09
11:28 a.m.
>If the head/voice coil assemblies have been removed you'll have to go =20
>through the entire alignment procedure which requires a special =20
>alignment pack. You'll also want to make sure that all of the dreaded =
My expeirience is that if you have a drive with a correctly-aligned
positioner/head assemly, you can remove it as an assembly, and put it
back in _the same drive_ and it will still be alighed. But if you move
positioenrs between drives you have to do a realignment.
The alignment procedure is not hard if oyu have the alignment pack. You
also need a 'scope (but just aout any 'scope will do) and a way of moving
the heads to a particular cylinder and selecting head 0 or head 1. I had
no prolems using a PDP11 + the appropriate controller for this, just
togging values int oteh controller registers from the PDP11's font panel.
If you use a PDP9/e, I think you have to write a trivial program for this.
Well right now I'll go for pretty much anything. I
guess a 34 or similar =
is
a good starter system and on some distant day I'll switch to say an 8/e.
THe disk packs are different between the PDP8 and PDP11 systems. They're
hard-sectored (by notches in a metal ring on the disk hub), PDP11 packs
are 12-sectory, PDP8 packs are 16 sector. The former are _much_ easier to
find.
-tony