10 Aug
1999
10 Aug
'99
2:27 p.m.
I think it's possible to reface a head with
diamond paste, but it will
take practice. A lot of practice (and a lot of wrecked heads). Some of
the older hard disk manuals (RK05-vintage) mention that touching the face
of the head is a bad idea because acids from your skin can etch the
ceramic head. Now, ceramics do _not_ disolve at all quickly even in
strong acids, so it must mean that even very minor damage is enough to
cause problems.
-tony
Tony,
I watched a support guy clean an RK05 head off with a pocket knife.
True story.
It had been dinged with an RK05 that had a 1/4 inch bend
in the platter due to it being shipped by an IDIOT at DEC security
who took it away from me at DEC training in Bedford...
They had to security check I wasn't stealing proprietary
software. (Someone a week or so earlier had lifted some VAX/VMS
pre-release stuff so they cracked down and took my RK05 RT11 games pack
I used to take to DEC training to run for fun at night.)
Anyway, I crashed the damned RK05 at DEC Finance Princeton
when I tried to boot my games and run Adventure on a PM and system move.
There were no spare heads in Princeton. My branch support guy
used alcohol, a punch card and a pocket knife and the RK ran perfectly
after it. (We had nothing to lose and the RK05 was NOT needed for the
machine's operation for finance. It was left over from the earlier
use of the machine when RSTS would run on RK's...)
RK's fly so high they actually ran a year in a machine where the tech
left the filter caps on.
As far as flying height, RK05's are the SR71 or U2 of the disk heads.
Bill
---
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org
Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC,
The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.