Hi Rod, I don't blame them either! Operating these drives means having access to spare heads, alignment equipment and and alignment pack - not taking into account the work to be put in all of this! Anyway, thanks for sharing your anecdote with us :) Greetings, Pierre
>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
