Whitechapel MG-1 workstation questions

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Sat Apr 24 12:53:22 2004

A few initial questions after a couple of these beasties turned up at
the museum:

Does anyone have OS install media for these? We've got the manuals, but
no floppies and I'm not sure what state the hard drives are in yet.

Don't suppose anybody has schematics / service information?

Predictably, the batteries inside the machines are toast and have taken
half the circuitry with them (grr!). I'll clean everything up and then
bypass the tracks which have been damaged / eaten away. Presumably
there's a trick to starting these things after battery failure by
feeding power straight to the internal relay - any ideas what voltage it
needs though? And once running will I still need to keep the relay
energised or will the PSU circuitry take over (even in the absence of
batteries - I'm just going to remove the damn things completely)?


I've got one hard drive to spin up and become ready after dumping half a
can of WD40 onto the bottom spindle bearing - it wouldn't even turn
before that. Now it just sounds like a sick cat. :-/
Hopefully it'll last long enough to get any useful data off it though.

I notice what seems to be a SCSI connector on the system board - can I
pull out the ST506 disks and just run a more modern (and hence reliable)
SCSI disk from here? Or is the SCSI connector (if that's what it even
is!) just designed to support a tape drive, and the machine always
expects the boot drive to be an ST506 disk?


cheers

Jules
Received on Sat Apr 24 2004 - 12:53:22 BST

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