Additional info. It eventually stopped with a "FILESTRUCT?" error. Hmmm, perhaps the tapes are bad. --Chuck At 04:51 PM 5/15/00 -0700, you wrote:

On Mon, 15 May 2000, Chuck McManis wrote: Bwahahah.. forgive the repost, but it had to be done. Just as a warning, though, the article contains some strong language which may cause your wallpaper to peel just a little. ok r. From: mabbas(a)staff.uiuc.edu (Majdi Abbas) Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery Subject: Exabyte whiners and real tape drives (tape drive dick length) Date: 7 May 1997 00:09:35 GMT Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana Lines: 161 Approved: tk50(a)godless.org Message-ID: &lt;slrn5mvi1v.ovs.mabbas(a)ux1.cso.uiuc.edu&gt; Reply-To: mabbas(a)uiuc.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Summary: TK50s blow. Keywords: TK50 masochism X-Newsreader: slrn (0.9.2.1 BETA UNIX) Status: RO X-Status: A So here I am, sitting with *bootable* install media for my VAX[1]. The catch: It's on TK-50 tape. *One* TK-50 tape. Which means I've got one shot, and only a 33% chance to make it close enough to even get that shot. That's on a good day. Today is a Monday. What follows is *not* useful information. If you have one of these, or have to work with one of these, you're too far gone to be recovering, and this isn't going to help you any. May the God of DEC have mercy on your soul. Oh, and before I get going, those of you who whine about Exabyte drives not ejecting tapes have no concept of a TK50. TK50's *do not* eject tapes. You have to arm-wrestle the drive for the tape most of the time, and even if you're lucky it's a manual eject[2]. Before you can eject the tape, the VAX has to think it's done with the tape. This is a pretty simple concept, if it worked. The TK50s were not in production very long, and for good reason. Rumor has it their replacements are better.[3] I'm going to describe the operation of a TK-50, ignoring some of the things that go along with booting a VAX. If you know them, I'm sorry, if you don't, well, consider yourself extremely lucky. 1) Wait for green light. 2) Pull drive flap up. 3) Stick tape in, right side first or it won't fit. 4) Coerce tape into fitting into the drive. 5) Shove it all the way back 6) Push drive flap down. You may need a hammer. 7) Press Big Red Button. Green light will go off, red light will start flashing, then go solid. 8) Tape drive begins reading tape. Here's where we go off onto a tangent for a little bit, although it is related. TK-50 (drive;cartridge;whole shebang) were designed by complete absolute fscking lusers. The cartridges are nice and small. This is because they are just a reel of tape. The other reel is inside the drive itself. When it starts to read a tape, it snags the beginning of the tape using a leader that whips around the spindle of the inside reel, and drags the tape in past the read and erase heads[4]. 9) Drive reads tape, system boots, all is good. </SARCASM> 10) You press the big red button again, wait 45 minutes for the thing to rewind, then it stops and the green light goes on, it moves a servo that allows you to move the drive flap again, then you are permitted to remove the tape. No eject mechanisim whatsoever. Now, on with the show. So here I am, booting the VAX. Things are going good, we get past the 5 minute POST, and the drive starts *reading* the tape. So the media is good and I'm actually thinking I have a chance yet. Then the gods decide that they've had enough fun at my expense, and it's time to get serious. Loading system software. 2.. ?4B CTRLERR, MUA0 ?06 HLT INST PC = 00000E0A Failure. My reaction: "Shit." VAX's reaction: "Yadda yadda yadda *WHOMP* *SCREEEECCCH* *thwap*" "THWAPthwapthwapthwapthwapthwapthwapthwapthwap" [continues] My reaction: "MotherfuckingasslickingpieceofshitasspirateDECtapedrive." Actually, my reaction was much more lengthy and probably much more obscene, but in the afterglow right now that's all I can remember. Knowing that the tape is hopelessly fucked and there went my last chance for a while, I don't even bother with the normal procedures. This is a TK-50. One must adapt constantly or get sucked in. I quickly wrestle the vax for the tape, remove it, and all seems good. But I know what's coming. A few hundred feet of half-inch tape, all spooled into the drives internals. I spend the next half hour removing tape from the drive, clean it up, check everything out, decide to try out this unlabeled TK50 I have. Nope, won't boot. Okay VAX, rewind tape. [Pause for one hour] VAX, surely you must be done with it now. VAX: Nope, it's still in there. I swear. Me: BULLSHIT. I can hear you flapping around empty. You're flapping around so much that the VAX is about ready to take off and my hair is being blown back. Me: Hits the power switch, pops the thing open, pulls the drive out. Grabs toolkit and commences disassembly of the drive. Sure enough, it's done. But I can't get the VAX to let go of the tape until it realizes that it's done, which isn't going to happen. Powercycling et al will not make it realize that it's done, it has to feel like relinquishing it's dinner. So, I'm now dissassembling the TK-50. Sure enough, the magic little leader that feeds these tapes in is broken. Surprise surprise. Tape looks okay tho. It's a couple of hours later, and I have one reassembled TK50, one sliced hand, a screwdriver with a broken tip, a spare black plastic part, three spare washers, a couple of spare screws and a spring. The tape is still in the drive, and I've managed to get all of the first tape into a box for convenient disposal at my leisure. Like I have leisure. Anyhow, I'd like to make you an offer: Free TK-50 tape drive, including install media in need of a manual rewind and a preloaded blank tape. Donatee must pay shipping and psychiatric admission fee. Includes spare parts[5]. WTB: One SCSI Qbus card. I am *not* going through this again. Especially because I took pictures of the aftermath of the first tape, and I'm going to post those near the VAX as a reminder. Let me know if anyone wants scans. Every single bad thing you've ever heard about any tape drive doesn't even begin to describe what the TK-50 is like. Exabyte 8200s have nothing on these things and never will. DEC was fucking up hardware design years before the advent of the 8200. I personally believe that the TK-50 is probably what nearly bankrupted DEC. The number of man-hours wasted in-house wrestling with these things alone is in the millions. It would have to be. I saw an RU-81A today. Now *there* is a sight. Appropriately in a junkyard. For those of you involved with BOFHnet, what do you think of a bofh.tdfh.tk50? This drive definitely has the FH aspect down. *sigh* Down, not across --Majdi [1] Currently hopelessly crippled due to a drive failure. [2] The problem is that DEC assumed that the VAX knew more about what was going on in this drive than the person feeding it ferrite. Boy did they guess wrong. [3] They *CANNOT* get any worse. [4] Which are opposed from each other. [5] You cannot disassemble one of these drives and not wind up with spare parts. They can't be anything important, because the drive has to work to suffer some performance degredation and they don't work, so there is nothing to degrade. -- Majdi Abbas &lt;mabbas(a)uiuc.edu&gt; I do not speak for my employer. "Damn, she looked a lot cuter in the bar..." -- Chris Rioux (He may be one of my coworkers, but he doesn't speak for them either)