Fairlight-CMI

Hi Todd & Peter,

been away for a while. Thank you both for your answers :-)

Todd, re your drive: It's possible to read and write scsi drive images under linux. I've made backups of mine, and also replaced a few disks by newer ones that way.

Your error description is very short - you'd have to determine whether your drive is really the problem (there's a possibility of  heads sticking to the platters so the motor cannot spin up anymore), or the CMI power supply, or the CMI computer logic (if the drive is jumpered to delay spinup until being addressed by the SCSI host, and the host never says a word, well, it won't spin up either).

An easy way to find out: get the drive out, put it into an external SCSI case, review jumper settings on the drive configuring spinup behaviour, and/or ultimately connect it to a PC with an SCSI controller and SCSI bios or Linux. That would also allow you to copy an image from the drive (to any other location that must have sufficient free space), in case it should decide to spin up only one more time. :-) Theoretically, I can tell you how it goes, but if you're unexperienced you might ask s.o. who knows any Unix/Linux to do it for you. Re. sticky HDU heads, I remember there are discussions in Usenet or the Web...

If your drive really does not spin any more, replacements - for the hardware - are easily available on ebay. I could thoretically dump one rather clean image of mine to a drive - would probably take an hour or so to do - or I even have one working spare boot disk that I got (rather expensive) from ebay years ago. But it's all OS 11.xx here, so I'm unsure whether that would be of any use to you - and well, it would definitely not help if your drive was *not* defective at all in the first place :-)

Kind regards, Joerg


--- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, "djangokitty2" <pdkaye@...> wrote:
>
> Hey Todd (and Joerg),
> [...]
> Thriller: probably would have been Michael Boddicker. Whether Stephen Dewey had jumped the Thompson Twins and joined Boddicker as his programmer yet, I donno'.
> 
> Peter Kaye
> 
> --- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, Todd Herreman <toddtoonz@> wrote:
> > 
> > Greetings Joerg,Regarding Thriller, I do not know the history there - my involvement was in the early 90's with the Series III; given the time of Thriller, it would have been a Series II (which I also had, but I was not in Los Angeles yet).
>