Azog-Thoth@cup.portal.com (William Thomas Daugustine) (12/01/90)
I was recently given a TS11 tape drive for the price of pickup, and have been having problems trying to operate it. Now, in my usual rambling mode I use whenever I post: A bit of background. The drive was a tad to big to fit in the door to my basement, so I removed as much from the frame as I could before we attempted to move it. This included removing the tape transport, the drive controller, and various odds and ends. There wasnt really that many wires to disconnect, and all of them were obvious to where they hook up. I got it into the house, and put back together in no time. I wired it up to my VAX 730 (the deal included the TS11 Unibuss controller), but when I first hooked it up, I got the ribbon wire between the drive and the VAX reversed. The 'density error' light was glowing, and the drive was inoperational. I flipped the cable over, and its mildly ok now. I can load a tape, and do some small operations on it (mount, init) but when I do things like backup or init/erase, it really flips out on me. The tape will spin for a few feet, and suddenly release itself. I suspect the cause of that to be the tape leading arms (they swing in to far, and it releases the motors). This happens all the time. I tried init/era msa0: backup, and it did a few token movements, and released itself, and basiclly locked up the console. Doing a backup results in different happenings. Itll spin for a few feet, and report back that it cant position the save set name, or that the device has timed out on me. Ive never used a TS11 tape drive before, but really, how hard is it to operate a tape drive? I thread the tape, and have to back it up a few inches for the arms to tighten up, and press LOAD and the bugger loads, and goes online. VMS knows how to deal with this drive, so thats not the difficulty. Some more things. There are a few switches on the back of the tape drive controller (the one inside the drive itself). They are labeled 'maint', 'ovr', and 'halt'. Of couse, the drive has to be OUT of maint mode for it to work, and same goes for halt, but what does this switch 'ovr' do? The person who gave this to me (who shall also remain nameless) was basiclly an unhelpful person. Gave me the drive and pretty much said 'have fun'. So, after all my psycobabble, is this an operator error or a device fault? In either case, I think I shall start looking for a TU80 to replace this TS11 Thanx for any possible help anyone can give me. Billy D'Augustine Azog-Thoth@cup.portal.com
mskucher@watmath.waterloo.edu (Murray S. Kucherawy) (12/10/90)
I have had this happen to us a great deal - it just comes from a lot of use, and some of the springs get a bit tensed up or loosened. Sounds like the tension arms need some simple adjustments. But I don't know how - we always called service dudes in for that. ============================== Murray S. Kucherawy ========================== University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 2A Mathematics/Computer Science Internet: mskucherawy@<machine>.UWaterloo.ca UUCP: uunet!watmath!mskucherawy <machine> ::= { watmath | dahlia | trillium | orchid }