Hard Drive Resurrection Hacks: What They Don’t Want You to Know! ShopTalk!

[@kenp1677]

Glad you guys are out there ! Thanks !

[@JimStark-t4d]

Late 1970s -> early 80s we developed CAD software, mostly for the electronics industry, on PDP11-34s, 40s, etc. We used RK05 then RL01/RL02 discs, DECTape, DEC VT11 and VS60 (then Megatek 7000/7200) displays, and as much as 64KB (!!!) RAM, all running on RT11! The same hardware & software was configured and shipped to customers, and was an "auto-interactive" PCB design tool i.e. a graphical user interface (light pen!) for manual design, but it also supported e.g. auto component place, autoroute, auto dimension check, all the post processing for manufacturing e.g. silk screen, artwork, drill drawing, component insertion, etc. All the software was developed in-house, and all written in PDP11 assembler!! I think I could still write PDP11 assembler today after all those years, because of its beautifully elegant design, but if necessary I still have the A4 size reference card which was all that was required to program the PDP11 (mind you, it was double-sided :| ).

[@Dustycircuit]

I would love to see an episode about engineer vs management diplomacy. How to tell your boss that reality is more complicated than a PowerPoint in a passive aggressive way.

[@HappyCat3096]

LOL I had so many managers who though programming and sys admin were no big deal because they took a coding course in college. "It's all just typing."

[@Life.After.Retirement]

Concerning the Disk Drive, the spare platter surface was used as a servo control to ensure the heads settled on the proper track, I think this technology is still used to control head position.

[@michaeleitel7186]

On that surface you have a factory written pattern that helps to position on the cylinders. As fare as i know/remember this could not be written by the drive itself. I also believe it had some correlation with the start of track 0. When you loosened the plate you could not get it to work again.

[@chinesepopsongs00]

@@michaeleitel7186on old MFM drives you could call -G=c800:5 with debug to write the pattern or -G=dc00:6 for SCSI drive on a Adaptec AHA-154x

[@jim-t4q]

Didn't this practice start with RLL drives?

[@Life.After.Retirement]

@@jim-t4q I believe it started with the removable disk packs. The first drives used a dependancy on returning to track zero, then counting steps out to the correct track, these were unreliable because the return to track zero would eventually cause the heads to shift. This caused a need for frequent realignment to enable swapping packs between drives. Also as the platters heated up and expanded, there had to be a method to track that expansion. The Servo platter solved both of those problems, allowing disk packs to be swappable between drives. I think this tech goes back to the late 60s or early 70s. I think RLL became available in the late 70s but not sure.

[@LerrySanders]

No question this week. Just wanted to say I'm so excited to know the rumors were true about the home automation and Glenn. Love the Pink Floyd in the background. Rock on my friend.

[@AKATEATime]

As for the Seagate sticking, I shimmied a computer back and forth essentially on the drive's axis and got it spinning one time. No shock involved in that. 👍

[@bjarkih1977]

I remember always running a park command before turning my 286 off in the early 90's It was a IDE 42 MB drive.

[@8bitwiz_]

I remember that 40MB was about the time that all hard drives suddenly had auto-parking. Maybe some patent had just expired.

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

Wow, kind of late for not having auto park even for a 30MB drive. Both Unix compatible systems as well as in DOS it would be used already as instructed by the BIOS, and there you may have had a setting for it. I know I never had to manually park a drive on a 286, nor on my Macintosh Lisa, then again I didn't get mine early on, but got my first 286 when the 386's were already being announced. Too bad they still costed so freaking much and it was above my means at the time.

[@bjarkih1977]

@@Bob-of-Zoid No setting in BIOS, there might have been an autopark function but this is what the guy who sold me the computer told me was best. I bought it used for 2/3 of the price of a similar 386, all the money I had,at the age of 13/14 in the summer of '91

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

@@bjarkih1977 I remember those days, and it wasn't much different than it is now where people will apply old methods to new stuff for not knowing how far we've come. I remember a few friends wanting to install DOS first before Windows XP (No more DOS, but a true 32bit Windows Kernel from NT), and one wouldn't believe me that XP isn't based on DOS, and tried it: He spent all the time installing DOS (still had it on freaking floppies), and as soon as he started the Windows install it told him it had to erase DOS! When I switched to Linux it was really hard, because there were more than one way to do a lot of stuff, but a lot of it was either outdated, not well documented as to Linux Versions and distributions, and really dating articles: Adding date counters to websites as to publishing dates wasn't nearly as wide spread as it is now, and still not used by many who should, so it could and did sometimes cause problems, and when you had 2, 3, and even 4 sets of instructions to do the same thing you had to figure out which one applied.

[@lawrenceharris7717]

We had a PDP-11/70 with 64 terminals running the laboratory at the hospital. It was connected to the instruments to collect control and collect the analysis and then collate and generate reports back to the floors. It replaced a PDP-9 with 8 terminals. Love the reminiscing about the old hardware.

[@HappyCat3096]

We used one to record the EEGs of coma patients to 8 inch floppies, then a different one to do the statistical analysis on the brainwave patterns and then generate a histogram showing brain function or lack thereof.

[@jcclark2060]

I love that two Canadians to correctly answer "I am well" Every American I meet says "I'm good" incorrect English.

[@ralfbaechle]

Some resources on English grammar treat the words well and good as synonyms. Confusing.

[@firstsurname9893]

7:21 That depended on what drive was inside as some A590s came with Seagate drives that supported autopark. The A590 setup disk includes a manual Park command that moved the heads to the landing zone which was only necessary for the Western Digital 93028X drives.

[@davidszacik2326]

When I was a student at New Hampshire Technical Institute in 1975 we had a GE 115. I can still picture the service tech with his oscilloscope tapping the cards with a small hammer trying to find the issue.

[@robertharker]

Back in the early 90's Sun shipped Quantum 80Mb 3.5" SCSI disks that had a "sticktion" problems. This would lock up the spindle. The common fix was to whack the drive on the right side towards the front. A firm rap and they would spin up. There was ASCII artwork about where to knock it that made the rounds in network news.

[@ralfbaechle]

Had one of these though not in a Sun. BAfair the only drive I ever had with the stickiness problem. After gently smacking it on the desk it spun up again - but with a few bad blocks. No bog problem as I was able to recover all data. Unclear of the bad blo ks were caused by the drive being unused for years or it cuddling the desk 😅

[@Dirtyharry70585]

The scsi we used start at 4gig. Lasted 10 yrs but when it sounded like a dentist drill time to image and prep a new drive

[@robertharker]

@@Dirtyharry70585 4gig? WOW 50x more space and probably the same price.

[@theritchie2173]

Thanks as always guys, perfect background listening for when I'm pretending to work (hey, it's Friday). I have a box full of 30+ years worth of hard drives which I need to test / consolidate at some point (I'll probably never find an actual use for that 20MB MFM, but hey it might have something 'important' on it).

[@markgarrett8963]

probably already answered - for KL the front end PDP-11 is going to share the startup disk to boot the 11 then be the system disk for the PDP-10. On VMS cluster redundant paths and shared disks could coordinate the access ( I could be wrong it’s becoming a long time ago). A rp07 and rp20 would be more fun to keep you place warm in winter ;)

[@ve2vfd]

Gotta say, I never tire of the Friendly Giant ending :) Of course we have an East Coast, dont'cha know the Maritimes are where Theodore Tugboat was from ;)

[@kingfishj8]

I worked for a white box reseller in the 80s. We had an oversized wooden mallet we named "The Hard Drive Calibrator" for just that percussive maintenance.

[@heyitsjay22]

Odd number of heads? One of those surfaces is most likely has servo code. A servo platter will improve accuracy and often used for reliability and increased storage density.

[@runderwo]

3:00 Spray some Deoxit in those intermittent slots and work the cards back and forth.

[@chaplainleggitt]

In the 1980s, on the way to work, I drove by a building with the name TANDON on it. The building was near Novi, Michigan. My first PCs had a Tandon hard drive.

[@kenniejp23]

Damn you for not choosing me as the winner. I'll now tell the school children that their "study buddy" has been stolen by the big bad Microsoft man 😂 Love the channel, Dave. Keep up the good work? (Question mark added so you hopefully see this!)

[@lawrenceharris7717]

From memory the Winchester technology was to lubricate the platter so the heads could land without being damaged. I believe good drives still did an auto park but it made them more reliable as an unintended head crash would it usually be fatal.

[@snowcatman]

I remember having to take my old 1990 tandy laptop and add parkdisk in the operating system .bat file on win3.11 as hard drives where still being dealt with for mobile use.

[@miscellaneousHandle]

PDP-11s were all over the laboratories in my day. then there's that whole Therac-25 mess that Dave talked about

[@txkflier]

When I have a drive that won’t spin up, I pick it up by its edges using my thumb and fingers and twist my wrist back and forth to make the platters rotate a little. In the test equipment calibration business, we always said to not hit something harder than you’d hit the bridge of your nose.

[@ralfbaechle]

That's abvery light stick ling then I've tried that, didn't work so it hit the deak at invreasing speeds until it obeyed. I've seen people slam the drive to the desk at like orbital speed, ick..

[@paulhernaus]

About roman numerals: some time ago a news anchor was fired because she pronounced the great leader of China as Eleven Jin Pin.

[@GlenHHodges]

😂. Thanks. I feel better.

[@schelsullivan]

I've recovered a few drives by putting them in the freezer for a few minutes.

[@ad5mq]

Dropping drives and freezing them has worked for me. I only do that in a effort to recover as much data as possible off them. Smacking them on the side sometimes works as well. I Usually seem to get a call from one of my sisters every 3 years or so about tax time that her computer is dead, and she NEEDS the data to file taxes (Her and her husband own a ranch - taxes are complicated). Usually the issue is a dead disk - and usually I can get most or occasionally even al of the data off it onto a new disk and then we are good for a few more years.

[@paulstubbs7678]

15:44 Servo tracks on a dedicated platter side was quite common back then

[@ronm6585]

Thanks guys.

[@shanehebert396]

SGI actually advised to "malletize" (literally, take a rubber hammer and whack it a few times) for "sticktion" problems with certain drives.

[@davidszacik2326]

On the NCR Century, on the multi-platter removable drives, the first step at power/spin up was a set of brushes would swing in. Then the head assembly would come in, there were multiple ceramic heads per surface. Once in place, air pressure would inflate a bladder under the heads to load them. The head assembly was controlled by a mechanical actuator with 1/2/4/8 solenoids.

[@KameraShy]

Back in 78-79 a PDP-11 (70?) was used to control an automated storage and retrieval system in a rack warehouse for a major electronics manufacturer I worked for. Robots on rails ran the length of the aisles, pulled drawers containing parts and presented them to an operator. Multiple terminals. Kept track of the inventory and where is was located. In theory.

[@RupertReynolds1962]

The classic cure for sticking drives was indeed a shock, but the smarter techs would use a rubber hammer, or take off their shoe and use the heel. The most reliable trick, I was told, was to hold the drive near the bearing and tap the side, so that the drive rotates a bit at the same time as the shock. It did make sense at the time... I've seen this done with the drive powered up, and heard them spin up immediately. I had a clone PC with a HDD on a full length ISA expansion card. If I let it cool down, it wouldn't start until I thumped it. It lasted a year like that, while I saved for a 486DX :-)

[@philsturdy]

I recall in the early 90s managing to read my grandfather's failing 20MB ST506 based HDD by placing it on it's side. It's wasn't seized, just refusing to read reliably hence I rolled the dice on changing the axis. Maybe a total fluke and just moving it changed the situation but whatever the reason I recovered the data. He did have backups on a series of floppies but HDD to HDD was preferable!

[@billj5645]

I remember it wasn't all that direct to install a new MFM drive on a PC running MS-DOS. Back in those days hard drives were more valuable than today, today you can easily buy a hard drive with more than enough capacity. In the early days they were expensive and people were always seeking more capacity than they had. People would sell broken hard drives and there were more companies that would repair them. I remember when a broken hard drive was worth $1 per MB. In the days of Unix going wild lots of people sold small multiuser minicomputers running Unix on a Motorola 68000 processor. Running multiple text based terminals on one of these machines was easy to do, we had around 8 terminals in my office. I don't know why a PDP couldn't work just as well.

[@HappyCat3096]

Under Windows they compressed files to save disk space. Compressed files would be displayed in blue on the file manager.

[@RonJohn63]

The PDP _did_ work just as well. 😀

[@jordancobb509]

I'm in MCSA and I learned a lot by studying those books. Those certifications are far from useless.

[@bertblankenstein3738]

The Mac SE/30 HDDs were notorious for sticking. A good slap on the right side and you back in business.

[@stanbrow]

PDO-11'S were also commonly used as the top layer of industrial control systems.

[@ilovecatsandsynths9702]

An odd number of heads on a drive is due to one head being dedicated to a servo surface the drive uses to find the cylinders.

[@DougDingus]

One time, I had to knock one against a table, then plastic bag it and keep it in a bowl of dry ice to keep it spinning while data got copied onto a better disk! Data was company accounting, backup failed. Talk about "no pressure!"

[@SeanBZA]

I had the same, just freezer was good enough.

[@DeskofJMH]

I remember in the early days of IBM clones having a hardcard (hard drive mounted on the ISA controller card itself) that would randomly stop booting. The unlikely fix was to take it out of the machine and drag it across the shag carpet for a second or two, then put it back in. Figured this out once after dropping it on the floor trying to troubleshoot. Yes the disk did spin up, the heads moved, etc. but for some reason it seemed to need an occasional "static electricity jump start" to boot again.

[@SeanBZA]

Novell netware drive, with a long IDE cable and power extender attached, placed in some heavy duty PVC bags, and left in the freezer for 5 hours. then copied to a new blank drive before it warmed up fully. Would fail at around 30C, taking longer and longer to do sector reads. Early 2G Seagate disk, when i took it in to Seagate for warranty they keep the office at walk in freezer temp, so that the receptionist was wearing a jersey and leggings, in the tropics, in summer. I closed the plastic clamshell part way through the test, and that extra insulation was enough to have it start to show the longer read times, and the multiple retries, and I got the new 2G drive. Copied the other drive on it, and put it in use, with the other one as backup of the system, as data was backed up on QIC tape, later on DAT, and I did a second backup daily on CDR.

[@marygauffin7290]

Industrial applications and console processors for VAXen were around for wrll after y2k. The 8600 and 11/78x contained 11/03 or 11/23s running rt11. The KL10s used iirc an 11/4x, etc.

[@Col_Panic]

You could find rack rails used cheap that ship easier. You can get a local HVAC shop to bend you a cabinet out of sheet metal that could screw together, so you can easily get to the back/sides, and they cam evem add vent flanges, with or without filter slots. It looks cool, you can also easily insulate it with duct insulation, if you want. I did that, but then got a free 23"wide("U to U") 7'± enclosed rack case, with flanges, tinted thick plexi door, and each side & top can be opened and sealed easy! Its from like 88ish. It needed adapters to fit modern 19" rack equipment, but a drill, a saw, and part of an old bed frame took care of that! The HVAC cab looked really cool imo, but that wide cabinet was too awesome to not use. I actually have some of my lab rack in the bottom and the top has my 3D printer. Its all filtered air fresh air, but the top and bottom are seprate ventalation wise. It will divert sever heat to the printer enclosure if it needs to be warmer, but that is automatic and only goes one way. Anyway, Im blabbering way off topic. Just am idea to save a few bucks maybe. Im kinda poor, so I always think, "I can just make that[....one day]"

[@nickwallette6201]

Ever since I moved to SSDs, every single drive fails to spin up now. I've dropped them, whacked them, frozen them, and even covered the holes that used to say "don't cover this hole," and nothing seems to help. Oddly enough, they still seem to work, so I just ignore it.

[@AiOinc1]

The drive in the thumbnail, a Conner CP3000F series, is really well known for the depredation of rubber bumpers inside which can cause the heads to get stuck and the drive to become unable to seek They're an unusual clamshell design, too.

[@chrissimpson1183]

I am glad I saved Glen, I did not think that Tim Patterson gave interviews....

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

I had a hard drive fail once, and it was very likely a spin problem, and so I read up on how I could run it just long enough to rescue the data from it, and found out to freeze it, as the shrinkage will free upp the platter and allow it to move at the proper speed before it gets too hot too again, and so I did, and sure enough it worked! I got all the data off, and thought I'd play with it some more and wrote and read randomly from it for a few hours and it got all messed up again, but worked for a few hours, so I got lucky. So there's one of a few possibilities that may still work with a modern hard disk drive, if needed.

[@JeffRyman69]

I have a friend who had an XT clone a long time ago. It had a 10 MB drive with the "stiction" problem. He left his case open on one side so he could reach in. He could somehow get ahold of an external gear and give it a little tweak to start the drive spinning.

[@SeanBZA]

That would hace been the stepper motor spindle, so the heads could be tapped loose of where they had stuck to the platter.

[@Autistic_Artist]

I'd like to see you do an episode on autism with proper support, how to get a diagnosis and the struggles with navigating a neurotypical world.

[@miscellaneousHandle]

as a parent of a child on the spectrum, i too look forward to any videos that help educate us. but, in my limited exposure, there appear to be a very wide range of capabilities that accompany the individual. i suspect the video would have to be fairly broad and void of specifics. as for obtaining a diagnosis as an adult, i know several adults who've gotten diagnosed recently. i believe they started by discussing things with a therapist that's trained in ASD

[@mikesveganlife4359]

Usually if the drive is at that point, the heads are likely stuck to the platter, so even knocking it might dislodge the heads from the arms, or leave parts of it on the platter that the head will then run into when it spins up and the get ripped off. I once in the early 90's was disposing of a old mini computer from the late 70's and it had 2 large 8" hard drives with clear cases that allowed you to see all the guts. I never got it powered up as it needed a new belt (belt driven) and my resources prior to the more useful internet were not all that great.

[@HappyCat3096]

We would gently tap them on the floor. The RA90 cases were like 2 feet long with a handle in the front so you would pull it out of the rack by the handle and give it a couple of tippy taps and rack it back in.

[@shadowoneau]

I’m not sure about the 2.11BSD version of dump/restore, but the later bsd dump/restore could do it over a pipe (ie dump -0 -f - /dev/disk0a| restore …)

[@ModernOddity728]

Thinking back to my early 20's- I recall trying to upgrade a wifi chip in a Lenovo laptop as well as run an eGPU but was never successful. I'm curious, when did hardware whitelists in bios come into the fold? What was the original intention? I'm sure they weren't meant to bar us from upgrading our systems and in turn create more e-waste sooner. Thanks! And Glenn, don't feel like a doofus- live and learn! Take pride that you're more knowledgeable than before rather than feel belittled. 😁

[@jim-t4q]

Worked in a computer shop in the 90's, had a lady from a Korean church bring in a dead computer that she was desperate to get working. Hard drive wouldn't spin. Ended up actually taking the top off the drive and gave the platter hub a spin and it spin up! 100% recovery of all the data. Might have been a DEC Rainbow. Hard to remember that far back...

[@noberet]

Thank you

[@markshade8398]

I absolutely agree with the comment on the certifications. 99% of the people I met with them didn't know enough to fill a business card. They could spout off mountains of garbage and worthless crap.... But to put it to work???? Nope. Total waste of time.

[@JanEringa8k]

I have a fuzzy memory that the VAX systems worked their clustering magic buy having the two machines each with a connection to a drive. The controllers had some smarts that allowed the cluster manager to figure things out. But you would need a proper vax-herder to verify.

[@grottyboots]

Maybe odd drive head might be a dedicated "servo" head? Instead of r/w-ing data, the servo head would follow a servo track written to a dedicated platter; since it's not near data, the servo track could be much stronger and therefore easier to track.

[@teamsafa]

Regarding stiction. At work at the time we had a i386 for misc tests, Linux being one. This one had a disk that had stiction problems. It was an old disk so the spindle motor was accessible between the enclosure and the control board. So to resolve the issue a hole was drilled in the chassis so you could put in a small screwdriver and nudge the motor in case the disk would not start. Think we had it like that for a year or so until we got a bigger disk.

[@harrymagooslum5770]

The servo-driven heads needed feedback to know where the head-stack was and so one side of a platter had concentric magnetic patterns that were written to it at the factory. Drives such as the Maxtor XT-1140 had “servo tracks” and a voice-coil to actuate the positions of the heads. Other late 1980’s hard drives, such as the Seagate ST-225 (10 MB capacity!!) used a stepper motor instead. Usually, when the driver chip for the stepper motor died it’d lose position as there was no feedback mechanism so data would get overwritten when it was erroneously on the wrong track. Replacing that driver usually fixed it but a new low level format was needed to wipe the drive so it could be used again. As well, if platters in a stepper drive needed replacing you could simply do the same. Not so on a servo drive as the servo-track platter could not be disrupted at all or it was almost always “game over”. I used to fix hard drives in the late 1980’s in Tukwilla and we’d visit Microsoft to open dead drives there at there campus so we could leave the platters with them removing any chance of stealing valuable data. MS would supposedly run a drill through the platters before disposing of them. In addition to any repairs needed, we’d install new platters in our Class-100 clean room. And if it was a Maxtor servo drive we’d write the proprietary servo-track back using the in-house “servo-writer” that I helped design and build. Sometimes a drive would not spin at all because the heads became so flat that they got stuck to the extremely flat platter. We called that “stiction” and it was usually not so fixable as a new head-stack probably cost similar to the hard drive itself. However, if one could free it up long enough to get the data off the drive there might be useful value in that. 5.25” IDE drives back then held only around 5 to 120 MegaBytes of data. The Seagate ST-225 was a $200 drive of 10 MB capacity that we could usually fix for a flat fee of $100. MS was ahead of its time for wanting to “recycle” but given that so many people of the great Northwest are grounded and sensible, it wasn’t a surprise. Those were great times and your video, Dave, rekindled those memories so “thanks”!

[@dennisjorgensen344]

Suspect dust, debris or oxidation in your bad card slot. We used to “clean” the card contacts with a #2 pencil eraser.

[@christopherpeterson6004]

For a Hard drive "crash": Sign waiver. Deep freeze for about 45 min, Vaseline around the lip of the freezer lid with a weight on the top. Powered off. Make sure you are plugged into an AVR sine wave power source. Power on the computer, but not the hard drive yet. Once you're setup with your restoration process(file copy, disk image, testdisk etc.), then power on the drive. The platter is shrunk and should let your disk spin without touching the reader arm.

[@reliant_turbo]

lol shag carpet. i have a static discharge hvac grate that i step on before touching boards and drives and stuff.

[@Billblom]

Had a hard drive (miniscribe) that got damaged by a lightning strike... which came in on the phone line on my BBS... The Modem was totally toasted, and an arc from the modem went to visit the miniscribe that was near by... A burn on the side of the miniscribe and a tiny hole in the sealed unit spelled DOOM for that 30 meg monster... (20 meg MFM turned into 30 with RLL..)-- I yanked the modem (a 2400 baud commercial board)--- and the computer came back to live, but C did not spin up. I ended up doing a "twist" of the chassis to get past the burned spot on the motor of the drive...and it spun up! Then did a big backup to a new 40 meg drive... sys'd that drive, and away we go.... NO bad spots seen at that point. But the drive was ready to go to the great dumpster in the sky... Had a friend who was working for Seagate in the warehouse at Tech Data. Would you want to hear a tale about moving manufacturing to the far east? The women doing the assembly work over there (Singapore?) could not get some of the high precision parts to go into the chassis of the drives. The local "management" who had no idea what materials science was said "Just use this WD40 on the chassis and motors, spindles and so on.... End result was it was not easy for the women to fit the parts into the chassis!!! Success. Sorta. Run the low level and then ship the drives back to the US. Well... When they arrived, it was all good.. For a week or so. However, while running, the drive got warm.. Warm enough to get the WD40 to become fluid... And ran to the spindle motor, then up the spindle...And from there, out across the platter. When the drives were powered down, you have a real good chance of the heads arriving on one of the WD40 trails on the platter. Next time you turned the drive on, nothing happened... Would not spin. People tried the drop thing.. no good.. they tried twisting the drive to get it to spin.. Nope.. Return it to Tech Data for a new one.. and another ... and another.. and another.. Seagate had palettes of them gathering at their distributors... That's where my friend got hired by them to do repairs in a new clean room at Tech Data. They sent spindles of platters for both 6 and 3 in drives for him to install, along with head assemblies. (Some of the drives had the heads so thoroughly glued to the platters that they ripped off the arms..) He replaced a bunch of platters every day, and collected them on the same spindles that the replacements came on. They made great frisbees to chop down shrubs and small trees. No good for computing of course. (when he opened his car's trunk, there were 2 spindles of 5" platters, and a spindle with the 3"...)--- and that was only a week or so worth of work at the mini clean room....

[@christopherpeterson6004]

Hard drive won't spin: Provide professional lab recovery option. Sign waiver. Take a large screwdriver, hold the disk perpendicular, hold the screwdriver by the pointed end, and rap the disk once with the handle of the screwdriver. Then proceed to the deep freeze method.

[@DaimlerSleeveValve]

Have to concur with you about vendor-specific certification. For one contract, Novell's CNE was a requirement. When we interviewed, we ruled out 90% of candidates with one question. "You have a Netware 3.11 server with 50 users. You need to take it down to change a drive. How do you take it down?" They spouted the official Novell "At the console, you input the command DOWN followed by EXIT". Goodbye. You now have 50 angry users.

[@JouMxyzptlk]

Two systems sharing one drive is possible, but they need to have an extra connection between the systems to coordinate who is currently in control while the other waits or shoves the data to be written oder the extra connection to the other system to write the data. I THINK, not know, the SCSI bus, if shared between two system, can be used to coordinate who is using the drive. But I am not sure whether I actually read it or whether I just think I read it somewhere.

[@jimbond4732]

? < question. Other than E-bay what are your sources for PDP parts. Building a PDP 11/73 and I'm sure I will need stuff

[@SenorSiesta]

Question for Dave: what the heck is quantum computing?

[@chrissimpson1183]

It took me six months to get an Autism diagnosis...

[@DividedWeFall]

0:01 Just a Q&A show. No useful info here. 70% viewer Q&A 15% arbitrary banter 10% politics 5% nostalgia Just filler here. If you have a hard drive you need to recover, look elsewhere for practical solutions. Sidenote: Dave gets railroaded in this episode and never gets to directly address the topic at hand.

[@hoefkensj]

dave= another f-stabber , damn (its FS-TAB! :)))

[@wskinnyodden]

Hahahaha IV / 4, reminded me of The 12 Tasks of Asterix in French when they are going up the governement bureocrap building and Obelix reads "IV (eeve)" mais non IV quatre, not eeev, four. hahahah

[@GlenHHodges]

Asterisk and Obelix… loved those (in English)

[@reprapmlp]

I have a (6ft tall) PDP-11 rack that I got from another friend back in Oz, but you can't have that.

[@edinkorat1296]

I bought a 80mb roll and it needed to be slapped against the case to get it to start.

[@captmulch1]

Ya’ll gonna have to pay a tariff when you import that rack over the border! 😊😂😂😂

[@mikescholz6429]

I remember seeing Bill Gates’ smart home controllers and devices featured in an issue of Popular Science in 1998 when I was in 6th grade.

[@markteague8889]

28:00 Whatever happened to the Porsche 959 Bill Gates purchased that sat in customs for all those years?

[@Dirtyharry70585]

Hahah had a seagate that wouldn’t spin and had one directory critical to machine ops. Remove disc cover , from separate box booted an 775 with win7 pro, open file manager , power to drive and lightly turned center hub… spun up, found directory copied to usb, and the Hkeys. Then tried to boot once more and it died. Built a new box reloaded system software and copied those files and Hkeys.. shazaaam. Customer next day. Not even a that boy, save my company’s butt cause the site tech never imaged any drives. And the customer got their work out on time , customer vp thanked me. I had three 2T external loaded with Pwd protected images, 10 boxes scsi waiting off line to plug and play that use Unix 5.

[@wtmayhew]

“And not spend three weeks doing it.” Well, actually….

[@GaryCameron780]

Quebec: The spoiled child of Canadian Confederation.

[@IAmPaigeAT]

I wouldn't fire them because they didn't know ipsec, I'd fire them for refusing to figure it out

[@adairjanney7109]

Keep getting those boosters dude, I can literally see the life draining out of your face, did you notice a mega drop in health after the first shot or are you still in denial like many I know.

[@wskinnyodden]

My French lacks a lot of vocabulary and practice, probably should move to Canada and fix it that way hehe Probably should have emigrated to the US as a child, become a mobster then make a deal with a protection programme hahahaha (Fugget About It reference)

[@wskinnyodden]

Hahahaha, had a quantum bigfoot (those thin flat pads of a disk) 1.8Gb that after a year or two decided that needed a slap on the side butt cheek to spin up. (I called it my female HDD hahahah, going to get backlash over this joke I bet)

[@WayneThornton-h1d]

First!

[@spartanboxing1]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/q5SZl5Joo7WGjposi=r7uuFqUKusHK4lrY

[@dataplatter]

Clickbait titles aren’t needed

[@marygauffin7290]

Industrial applications and console processors for VAXen were around for wrll after y2k. The 8600 and 11/78x contained 11/03 or 11/23s running rt11. The KL10s used iirc an 11/4x, etc.

[@lawrenceharris7717]

From memory the Winchester technology was to lubricate the platter so the heads could land without being damaged. I believe good drives still did an auto park but it made them more reliable as an unintended head crash would it usually be fatal.