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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.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



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