5 Jul
2007
5 Jul
'07
11:56 a.m.
It's pushing 10 years since I got rid of my Sirii,
but IIRC the hard drive
and controller board are mounted in such a way that the cabling between them
is inaccessible when they are mounted in the machine.
My memory of working on the Sirius is that it was made to be easy for
board-swappers (you almost never had to remove screws, only loosen them,
etc, and very difficult for real repairers (when the machine was
assembled you could get to vritually nothing, cables weren't long enough
to set it up in bits, and so on. Not quite as bad as the DEC Rainbow, but
close.
The only way to work on the hard drive is to remove it from the metal
assembly carrying the drives and prop it up somewhere close bye; in fact
there should be no problem with removing the entire "drive carrier" and
reconnecting the hard drive alone (I'm sure I did this with mine when I was
tinkering with it).
If the hard disk is a standard ST412 interface (and I am darn sure it is,
even though I've never seen one), I would guess you could use somewhat
longer cabels to link it up for testing. Then at least you could have the
drive itself alongside the machine so you could stick a probe on the
trstpoints.
-tony