Lately, I've been using an old Micro PDP-11/73 for some development work. It's compact, fits under the desk, and is plenty fast enough for the project. But, it only had a single RD32 disk drive in it, which left me a little cramped for disk space. There's not enough room to install DECnet, for example, so that means I have to sneakernet things on and off of it using RX50s.
So, I figured I'd add another RD32, which would double the disk space available. I installed a 6 button control panel (not strictly required, but it makes adding a second drive to a BA23 system easier). Time to install the disk... I spent quite a little bit of time on this - the cables I had aren't keyed, so I had to span the vector space of possible orientations looking for how to plug them in. No soap - the thing still wouldn't come on line. I tried some diags, but, since I didn't know how these particular diags acted when everything was working, I couldn't really conclude anything from their results.
It finally started making some odd noises, so I tried another disk, which worked fine. I pulled the one that wouldn't work apart, to see if I could tell what the problem was. Here's a picture of what I found....
It's a picture of the disk arm for the top platter, with a broken wire trailing off from where the read/write head used to be attached. So, no surprise it wasn't working.
Here's a picture of me reflected in the top platter - nothing to do with the problem, it's just how I do a selfie...
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