Well, one option might be to try to find an identical drive and swap boards between then. In my (admittedly rather limited) experience, swapping logic boards is just a matter of taking a few screws out and making sure the boards get lined up correctly. But you need an identical drive to swap with. If the drive is still available, getting another identical one is likely to run way less than $6K and may well be worth doing against the chance it'll work. You will almost certainly need a torx of the right size, which probably means a decent set of torxes; every drive I've looked at with an eye to mechanical disassembly has been held together with torxes. For that matter, I'm in a similar situation: I have a Maxtor which reports itself as having 0 heads, 0 sectors/track, and 0 cylinders; if I had an identical drive, I'd try swapping boards, but I don't. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Ethan Dicks declared on Thursday 10 March 2005 12:12 am: If it's just because he nuked the board with an overvoltage from the P/S, there's actually a good chance that it'll fix things. I've done it before. I'm sure it won't fix all problems, but electronics missing the 'magic smoke' it may help with. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCS --- http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

People, I clearly read below where David requested that you "drop me a note off-list". It is these very off-topic threads that break out that are causing Jay and the moderators grief. Please police yourselves better. On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, der Mouse wrote: -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

At 09:28 AM 3/10/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Dayum. Here we go again. I was biting my tongue. I did respond off-list to the original post. Then others posted more on the list. I sincerely thought my post was on-topic because it's about methods of saving old drives, and the topic comes up every 3-9 months. - John

Jules Richardson wrote: Not entirely -- not *everyone* on usenet is a case-modder-d00d. The very nature of the fact that they're using Usenet instead of some web-based forum attests to that. It's just a shame that Usenet has so much spam. I still love it (I participate on comp.lang.asm.x86 and comp.compression every day). -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

----- Original Message ----- From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf at siconic.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 12:04 PM Subject: Re: [OT] Troubleshooting ATA Drives.. Why not bite the bullit and pick a Day, Month, And Year for what is "classic" and be done with it. You have a 10 year rule now with 100 exceptions that are older then 10 years but nobody wants on the list. Maybe the core people here only care about mainframes from the 60's-70's, if so then just say so and be done with it. I can think of quite a few systems made in the 80's that have much newer equipment added to them (including ATA HD's) for functionality. When you keep older systems running with newer hardware where can you turn for help?

vrs wrote: "We can rebuild him - better stronger faster than before" The 6 Billion $ Man The main problem I see with the current crop of PDP-8 clones/replica's today is lack of paper tape and other hardware at the time -- non volatile memory. I could get a cpu chip off people on this list but with out I/O like paper tape or a modern replacement the software for the CPU is very limited in what can run and what can future hold as mechanical devices wear out in time. I think we need to get mechanial minded people ( also a dying breed) to help where electrionic/computer stuff does not cover forgotton techology. Sooner or later Epay will stop having old devices like TTY's and we will have to a) Hoard them, b) Let them wear out c) Rebuild them d) Forget about them. Take your pick ... I favor c but I don't have the skills. Ben allias woodelf

I actually don't see why this is off-topic, but anyway... \begin{rant} Is that suprising? At least over here the only prople who seem to get any sort of respect are those who can kick a football or strum a guitar badly. Engineers, scientists, etc, are worthless. Heck, you don't get any friends if you'd rather spend an evening holding a logic probe rather than a beer glass \end{rant} Sorry, this is a sore point with me, and with most of my friends.... I nearly added a couple of books on metalwork / lathe operation to my list of recomemnded books for classiccmpers, but I thought I'd probably be flamed for being off-topic. Books like : The Amateur's Lathe Various books from the 'Workshop Practice' series. And many others in the Camden booklist (and probably available from Lindsay Books). Anyway, a small lathe is something that most classiccmpers should probably consider owning. Small meaning < 4" centre height or so. Even something like a Peatol (Taig) or a Unimat is enough to make a lot of parts for classic computers. I have a Myford Super 7, which is a bit larger. A vertical slide is very useful becaue it lets you do small milling jobs too. Of course a proper milling machine is much better, but also a lot more expensive and takes up a lot more room. I regard both the 3 jaw self-centring and 4-jaw independant chucks as being essential. Along with the tailstock drill chuck, a set of centres, a faceplate and a reasonable selection of cutting tools. With such a machine (and skill which I don't possess yet!) you can make most small mechanical bits for your classic computers. Bearing housings, pulleys, bushes, spacers, spindles, etc. You can also, of course, use the lathe to make more tools. Not just things like pullers, drifts, etc (sometimes essential to do repairs without damage), but also things like that injection moulding machine that was mentioned a week or so ago. And that would be quite capable of making keycaps, switch toggles, etc. Is this off-topic? I don't know. I favour (c) too. To me, not having the skills is a good reason to start learning... Let's be honest. You don't _depend_ on your PDP8. You are not going to die, or be unable to afford food, or whatever if it's down for a month or more. Which means that if it takes you a month to get the skills to make the part you need, well, that's part of classic computing. I would recomend trying to find (or make?) an optical paper tape reader. They're kinder to the tapes, and they have many fewer wearing parts in them. I am, perhaps, lucky. I rescued 4 or 5 Trend paper tape readers about 10 years ago. These are very simple mechanically (and the eleectronics isn't much worse!). All the parts likely to fail are either standard (ball races) or can be made on a small lathe. In fact the part that fails most often is the illumination bulb, and that's a standard 12V car bulb in most of them, and a 24V lorry bulb in the others. I wouldn't fancy trying to make some of the parts from, say, an ASR33 at home, but it's suprising what can be done if you have to.... -tony

On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 20:26 -0800, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Both are still running just fine in my 18 year old NCR :-) (despite having been parked in a less-than-dry garage for ten years)