17 Jun
2005
17 Jun
'05
12:03 p.m.
today I have powered up my Ampex DFR 996
removable/fixed combined disk
drive. After tweaking a bit around the address plug (btw does anybody
have an original one?) I got it to start. It said to be ready only
once.
And made a horrible sound with the head of the
removable disk. After
that I tried it again but the drive just inserts the head for a short
moment (with the same noise) and retracts immediately, shutting down.
sigh...
it is a REALLY REALLY REALLY bad idea to just power old removable disk
drives up to see if they will 'just work'
as you discovered, THEY DON'T, and destroy themselves in the process
look at the messages from Tom Jennings about all the trouble he had
getting his going over the past few months
the disturbing thing about this is 1) you now have a piece of junk
that is most likely unrepairable unless you are VERY lucky and can
clean the heads 2) you've destroyed the disc pack (which may be
difficult to repace) and 3) you've lost whatever software was ON
that pack (generally not a huge issue with pdp11s, but is a real
loss on some other minis like Interdata)
take a look at the logs from the restoration of Paul Allen's PDP-10
for a real horror story about getting drives to run again.
http://www.pdpplanet.com/TemplateRestoration.aspx?contentId=8