24 Jul
2011
24 Jul
'11
4:21 p.m.
On Jul 24, 2011, at 1:43 PM, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 18:48:02 +0100 (BST)
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
I did this a few minutes
ago. As expected, the previous owner
transported the drive without lock and the medium inserted. Even worse:
He powered it up in this state. There is a big headcrash. I.e. Track 0
has no longer any oxide... :-( At least I'll need a new medium.
Probably heads? Or can the heads be cleaned and reused?
Depends. Heads aren't *that* hard to replace. The big issue is re-aligning and that
officially requires an explicit alignment pack (noted by the red color of the pack). Of
course you *can* perform an alignment with any good formatted pack. However, interchange
between your drive and others can be an issue depending upon how badly aligned the drive
that formatted the pack was.
Probably.
I'll see.
OK, remvoe the top cover of the RK05.
Plan B: Get a RL11 and connect my knowen to work RL02.
That works too. RL11's aren't that hard to find.
Plan C: Build some modernish hardware to emulate the RK05 drive.
Meh.
Or even better: Get some UniBus to SMD or ESDI controller. I have some
nice SMD and ESDI disks around. Winchester disks are so much more
reliable.
You can find those too. I don't know. I haven't had all that much trouble (ie
once I got them working) with RK05s or RL01/2s. RK05s are pretty reliable and built like
a tank so other than messing up the heads by doing something silly, it's a pretty
reliable beast.
TTFN - Guy