Autzoo.1228
hacknews
utzoo!henry
Fri Dec 18 18:17:28 1981
magtape follies
Well, it's still bust.  In fact, the Plessey man has carted the drive
off to check it out at the office, and likewise our controller boards.
The controller now on the bus (with the drive cables sort of hanging
out the rear) is Plessey's board-swap set.

Swapping one of the boards seemed to cure some of the flakiest behavior.
By no means all, alas.  Even swapping ALL the boards and the drive
connectors didn't help;  the controller persists in giving absolutely
bizarre failures (system crashes, preposterous combinations of error
bits, system hangs, some even density-dependent -- "cp /etc/users /dev/mt0"
produces errors and/or hangs at 800 and CRASHES THE SYSTEM on a trap
type 0 at 1600;  "dd if=/etc/users of=/dev/rmt0 bs=20b" at 800 spins
the tape forward for a moment and then interrupts through vector 0 [didn't
try this one at 1600]!).  Moreover, the drive appears to be sick too, and
the heads are skewed enough that they have to be realigned, which MAY
mean that recently-written tapes won't be readable.  Argh.

Tune in Monday for the next sickening episode of As The Magtape Turns.