9 Jan
2007
9 Jan
'07
11:42 a.m.
I acquired a couple of M4 9914 9-track tapes drives a while ago and
finally got around to trying to do something useful with them.
Never having used one before the first thing I did was just see if it
would mount a tape ok. The first brand new tape I tried was sucked
into the take-up reel ok and wound a few turns, then sucked all of the
way back out, then the drive tried again before giving up with a N T U
(No Take Up) error. I then tried a second brand new tape from a
different vendor and got the same results.
Then I went back into the garage and hefted (it's a workout) the
second 9914 drive into my work area and tried both tapes on the second
drive with the same result.
Then I tried manually threading a tape onto the take-up reel while the
drive was powered off and making sure that winding the take-up reel
caused the supply reel to turn, then powered on the drive and got the
same N T U error again.
I looked in the manual and it said something about the N T U error
occurring due to a lack of tach pulses. Then I looked at the tape
path for what might be the tach sensor and guessed it was probably a
metal roller near the take-up reel. I used a marker to put a dot on
the top of the reel and noticed that it wasn't rotating when the tape
was moving past it.
I tried rotating this roller by hand and I could feel detents while
rotating it and I assume it is attached to some type of rotary
encoder. Now to the point posting this here, my questions are does
anyone know if this roller/encoder needs any lubrication? If so, how?
It felt somewhat stiff when I first tried rotating it and got a
little easier to rotate the more I kept at it. And secondly, this
roller did have a thin rubber coating which had turned to goo. I
cleaned the goo off of the roller. If anyone else has seen this on a
9914 drive (I assume so, it was goo on both of mine) did they do
anything about it? Is there a good way to re-rubber this roller?
After cleaning the goo off of the tach roller and getting it to rotate
a little more freely I did see it rotate when the tape was moving past
it (wasn't sure if it would without the rubber) and now the 9914 will
mount a tape most of the time.
-Glen
9 Jan
9 Jan
12:46 p.m.
Glen wrote...
I acquired a couple of M4 9914 9-track tapes drives a
while ago and
finally got around to trying to do something useful with them.
Glen, do we just
collect all the same gear? ;)
I have two 9914's, both having problems. One of them the problem is the ADP
board for sure. The other one I THINK the problem is the ADP board. There
are really good docs on these drives available... service manuals,
schematics I seem to recall too... but I just haven't had a chance to dig
back in to mine for a long time.
Never having used one before the first thing I did was
just see if it
would mount a tape ok. The first brand new tape I tried was sucked
into the take-up reel ok and wound a few turns, then sucked all of the
way back out, then the drive tried again before giving up with a N T U
(No Take Up) error. I then tried a second brand new tape from a
different vendor and got the same results.
Did you try inputting the CE unlock code
and running the recalibration? May
help, certainly won't hurt at this point.
And secondly, this
roller did have a thin rubber coating which had turned to goo. I
cleaned the goo off of the roller. If anyone else has seen this on a
9914 drive (I assume so, it was goo on both of mine) did they do
anything about it? Is there a good way to re-rubber this roller?
On my rollers,
the rubber is perfectly fine. I lucked out I guess.
Jay
2:03 p.m.
On 1/9/07, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Did you try inputting the CE unlock code and running
the recalibration? May
help, certainly won't hurt at this point.
After I got a tape to load ok by fiddling with the tach roller for a
while the drive does seem to work. I was able to use a linix machine
to dd the 2.11BSD files to a tape in the 9914, and then used dos
machine to read the tape back from the 9914 into a tap file using st,
then verify that I could boot the tape image into a 2.11BSD
installation using the demo version of Ersatz-11. So it would appear
that the 9914 can write and read a tape now.
On my rollers, the rubber is perfectly fine. I lucked
out I guess.
The rubber on the tach roller on my 9914 might have been ok if I
didn't start rotating the roller for a while with my finger to see if
I could get it to rotately more freely.
Now that the rubber goo has been removed, I wonder if that has changed
the diameter enough that the linear tape speed is different enough to
cause interchange issues with tape written on other drives. Or is
that not an issue? Is the timing information recovered from the data
on the tape regardless of the tape speed, within reasonable
tolerances?
I still would like to know if I should lubricate the tach roller
somehow, and re-rubber it somehow.
But now I'm stumped on getting a real 11/73 box to boot from the
2.11BSD tape on the 9914 drive. Does anyone have a manual for the
Dilog SQ703, or has anyone got one running in one of their systems?
That's what I'm trying to use to connect the 9914 to the 11/73 box
without much luck in trying to boot from the tape. This is the first
time I have tried doing anything with a real 11/73 box so I'm new to
this all around.
Has anyone used a 9914 drive through the Pertec interface instead of
the SCSI interface? It appears you could do that by removing the SCSI
interface board and the access covers over the Pertec connectors in
the back of the drive. I have a DQ142 (anyone have manuals for that?
DU142 is on bitsavers, DQ142 is not) and wonder if that might be
workable alternative to using the SQ703 with the 9914 if I can come up
with some cables to hook the two together.
-Glen
30 Jan
30 Jan
10:49 p.m.
Glen Slick wrote:
Has anyone used a 9914 drive through the Pertec
interface instead of
the SCSI interface? It appears you could do that by removing the SCSI
interface board and the access covers over the Pertec connectors in
the back of the drive. I have a DQ142 (anyone have manuals for that?
DU142 is on bitsavers, DQ142 is not) and wonder if that might be
workable alternative to using the SQ703 with the 9914 if I can come up
with some cables to hook the two together.
I've got a Cipher M990 Pertec drive I'll trade for one of your 9914
drives. :) I'll include the 16 bit ISA ATC-16 Pertec controller card too.
--
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Embedded Linux Technologist - http://eLinux.org/
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1 Feb
1 Feb
1:24 p.m.
On 1/30/07, Tim Riker <Tim at rikers.org> wrote:
I've got a Cipher M990 Pertec drive I'll trade
for one of your 9914
drives. :) I'll include the 16 bit ISA ATC-16 Pertec controller card too.
It looks like I'll be acquiring a Fujitsu 9-track drive along with a
PC based controller card and the whole PC so I'm probably set with PC
interfaced 9-track drives. Now I just need to get one working with a
q-bus controller, either SCSI or Pertec.
For now I should keep the 9914 that is working, and the other one
currently isn't working. It won't successfully mount a tape.
Shipping these things is pretty expensive too. I think it was
somewhere around $100 when I had one of them shipped to me.
-Glen
2:33 p.m.
In article <1e1fc3e90702011324m48ff8b0eu39f033db70625ded at mail.gmail.com>,
"Glen Slick" <glen.slick at gmail.com> writes:
It looks like I'll be acquiring a Fujitsu 9-track
drive along with a
PC based controller card and the whole PC so I'm probably set with PC
interfaced 9-track drives. Now I just need to get one working with a
q-bus controller, either SCSI or Pertec.
Are you buying that one on ebay?
--
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Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
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