I can't say I blame them. It was a lot of work to get a drive running after a head crash. If it was a bad crash, there could be extensive cleaning to be done followed by replacing one or more heads. Then the new heads had to be aligned. If you hadn't cleaned thoroughly enough, you risked damaging the expensive alignment disk.
Once I came back from lunch to see the operators had 3 drives open. They kept swapping a disk pack which was giving I/O errors to new drives and were crashing heads along the way due to the damaged disk pack. I stopped them before they spun up the pack on a 4th drive. That wasn't as bad as the time one of them dropped a disk pack and bent platters. That ripped heads completely out of the mounting mechanism. Ah, the good old days! Rod > On Jun 2, 2023, at 2:51 AM, P Gebhardt via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > wrote: > > Hi all, > > I just came across pictures on the LCM website about their SDS Sigma > installation there. > On the pictures, one can see 10-platter disk packs in the corner and stored > on the disk drives. > Did the LCM ever had these in operation, either for data retrieval or even > demo purposes? > I know of the Jim Austin Computer museum where they fixed a CDC 9766 drive > but it suffered > a head crash after a few hours according to their description which led to > giving up the operation > of these drives. > > Greetings, > Pierre > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- > http://www.digitalheritage.de
