This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in
1995; any technical information is probably outdated.
Drive swap
Article: 7689 of alt.hackers Newsgroups: alt.hackers From: steve@imperial.demon.co.uk (Steve Shipway) Subject: Drive swap Approved: steve@imperial.co.uk Organization: Imperial Business Systems X-Posting-Host: imperial.demon.co.uk Date: Thu, 20 Apr 1995 11:49:29 +0000 Message-ID: D7C0uJ.AqC@imperial.demon.co.uk Sender: usenet@demon.co.uk Lines: 33 Status: RO
Well, I suppose its about time to post something here. I was installing MS-Office last night (I know, a cruel thing to do to a poor defenceless PC, but unfortunately I need it) and at disk 5 (of 24) the little metal cover from the 3.5" disk caught in the drive. Pulling the disk out left the metal in the drive. Using a pair of scissors I managed to extract it, but the spring remained in there and, 2 disks later, jammed the head. So - 1/3 of the way through, with a knackered drive. I opened up the box (without shutting anythign down of course) and swapped the cables from the drive to a spare I happened to have lying about. The BIOS didn't seem to notice, and used the new drive happily. Meanwhile I extracted the old drive, and screwed the new one into the chassis, all the time continuing to swap the disks. By the time the lid was back on we were up to 16 disks, and the installation continued without a hitch. Of course, I next dismantled the drive, extracted the annoying spring, and reinstalled it (into a different PC) and it now works fine. That will have to do for the moment, unless you want the story of configuring our UNIX email gateway, using sendmail, with no manuals and never having used sendmail before (I prefer mmdf), so that our machine names are hidden behind the domain name. And I only screamed once or twice! -Steve, with a weeks software testing stretching ahead of him (sigh) -- Steve Shipway steve@imperial.co.uk Voice: +44 117 925 1700 Imperial Business Systems, 54-56 Park St, Bristol, UK Fax : +44 117 925 2515 The opinions expressed in this message are not | Woe unto them that rise up necessarily those of Imperial Business Systems | early in the morning -Isaiah 5