Today I had some time for retrocomputing. I decided to try to repair
some stuff.
Long time ago I have got a SCSI floppy drive for original SGI
Indigo. It never worked. If I'm not mistaken it even didn't show in
diagnostics. Thus I have decided to replace the drive with a new one
(SGISs use special sleds for all drives - and every SGI machine used
different ones).
When disassembling the drive I have found that some cables are not
connected at all and that pins of one connector are terribly bend. So I
have fixed these issues and inserted the drive to the Indigo. To my
great surprise the machine booted normally (no SCSI errors at all) and
the drive was (properly!) detected by the IRIX! So I inserted the
floppy medium.
The computer told me that the floppy was not formatted and asked to
format it. In short: formatting failed. Insertion of actually formatted
medium ended with the same dialog. I tried to disassemble the thing
once more but the reading heads seemed to be absolutely clean and
everything seemed to be intact. Thus I have no idea what is wrong.
I have tried to replace this drive (a TEAC one) with a SONY drive (from
the Sun workstation). It does not fit the sled (the cable connector has
different position and orientation so I was not able to mount a
connected drive). Now I'm thinging about finding an empty SCSI box to
try to use the SONY as an external drive. I should have at leas one
somewhere, I think.
