The Second Tape Drive

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Thursday night we worked on the second tape drive a bit to try and find the source of the logic problem. We swapped Flip Chips around between both drives hoping the problem would move to the top drive. The problem left the second drive but did not appear in the first drive. Odd. It would appear that the Flip Chips were just dirty and not making full contact. We proceeded to clean all the Flip Chips in both drives. This fixed our logic problem.

We then put a tape on the second drive to run a format test. We noticed the left reel wasn't positioned correctly so the tape wasn't straight and made rubbed on the side of the track.  We adjusted it and then ran Mark12. It worked fine and said it was a good tape.

We then ran the tape data test and it also ran fine (this test will just run forever until it finds an error. So Warren said it would be wise to stop it while it's reading the blocks backwards, since it can't write backwards, that way there is little chance of messing up the tape.


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