bishop@skat.usc.edu (Brian Bishop) (02/26/88)
The other day a disk got stuck in my drive. When I tried to remove it (perhaps a bit too forcefully) a small piece flew out. It's a black piece of plastic (graphite-like) with a spring and a cap: | <- Plastic ----- <- Metal Cap |~ ~| |~<- Spring winding around plastic I have found the hole it fits in (right where the write protect tab is when the disk is in the drive), but cannot make it reliably recognize writable disks. Without the piece of plastic, all disks are write-protected. This is very annoying, since it is my second drive. Looking through the RKM, I see a pin on the interface labelled WPRO (14 - Asserted by selected, write-protected disk). SO.......can I snip this pin, thereby making all disks writable? I would rather have that than what I have now. brian bishop DISCLAIMER: Warranty? Haaahahahahahahahaha! What's a warranty? have a nice day fnord.
ssd@sugar.UUCP (Scott Denham) (03/05/88)
In article <7232@oberon.USC.EDU>, bishop@skat.usc.edu (Brian Bishop) writes: (truly tragic tale of destuction of write protect mechanism deleted) > This is very annoying, since it is my second drive. Looking through the > RKM, I see a pin on the interface labelled WPRO (14 - Asserted by selected, > write-protected disk). > > SO.......can I snip this pin, thereby making all disks writable? I would > rather have that than what I have now. Well, I'm no expert, but I've fooled with some of the drive lines, and I think that a) to be sure, you'd need to tie the line to +5v - I don't know if there's a pull-up in there anyplace. b) If you do this, you will not only permananly write-enable your second drive, but your first one as well!! Probably not a great idea, unless you never write protect disks anyway. I think you could improvise by inverting the select line to the drive and feeding it to the write protect - that way, you'd only affect the selected drive. You could even go the whole picnic and add a switch - a thought I'd had several times given the difficulty of flipping those little tabs at 3 am. (I had in mind more of a permanant write protect, though). > > > brian bishop > > DISCLAIMER: Warranty? Haaahahahahahahahaha! What's a warranty? > > have a nice day fnord. Scott Denham warantees are just documents telling you when they expect it to break!