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A comment on A 1970s Cray-1 hard drive has been imaged.

Re:A 1970s Cray-1 hard drive has been imaged by 0x12 on Wednesday September 07, 2011 @07:19AM (#2969135)
That's pretty impressive. Not only did they image the disk, it was a disk that had had a head crash and one damaged head which they managed to restore to functioning well enough to capture the data.

Now of course the big question: what is on that disk?

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Re:A 1970s Cray-1 hard drive has been imaged by danbee on Wednesday September 07, 2011 @09:23AM (#2969404)
I believe the head crash occurred on a different disk pack, one that they were using to test it.
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Re:A 1970s Cray-1 hard drive has been imaged by Maci on Thursday September 08, 2011 @03:18AM (#2972950)
From the Paper:

Unfortunately, within 30 seconds of the heads being loaded a high-pitched whining noise began to be emitted from the drive, implying a potential head-to-disk contact was taking place. The drive was then powered down and the disk pack and heads were carefully examined. Thorough examination revealed that Head #4 on the drive (which reads the bottom surface of the lowest data platter) had 'crashed' into the disk surface and scraped away a concentric ring of oxide material, permanently damaging the platter. This is a good time to point out the advantages of not experimenting with your primary source material when performing digital archeology experiments!

Src: http://www.archive.org/details/2011-cdc-disk-archaeology-fen...

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