Disks on csegura

BBC Disk field notes

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recentrly bought a broken BBC Diskdrive and a Watford DFS disk controller card, to try to repair it. The disk drive is a dual 5.25" disk drive, and the controller card is a Watford Electronics DFS (Dual Disk Filing System) card version 1.54T.

The unit comes with two different disk drives, a Mitsubishi MF503A and a Mitsubishi M4853-342MG. Each drive has a switch on the front panel to select between single-density (40 tracks) and double-density (80 tracks) operation.

Replacing the 5.25" Disk Drive

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Replacing the 5.25" Disk Drive

I have a 5.25" disk drive that is not working properly. I have tried to clean the heads, but it is still not working. I have decided to replace it with a new one. I have found a new 5.25" disk drive on Wallapop (like ebay here in Spain), and I have bought it. Most of units are used, and untested, so I have been careful selecting the one I want to buy. Seller says that the disk drive is untested but was retired working. It’s no the first time I buy untested hardware, so the seller seems quite honest, and I trusted her.

Cleaning Avid Ultra 320/LVD SCSI Drives

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cleaning Avid Ultra 320/LVD SCSI Drives

I recently acquired a couple of Avid Ultra 320/LVD SCSI drives. These drives are used in the Avid DS Nitris system, which is a high-end video editing system. The drives are:

2 x 146GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 drives.
2 x 300GB IBM Ultrastar 10K300 drives.

The drives are in good condition, but they have been sitting in storage for a while. I decided to clean them before using them.

LVM Add Disk (work notes)

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Introduction & Explanation (pasted)

Why LVM?

The reason why we love LVM is because when you need to increase the space it’s really easy. If you have vanilla EXT4 and you want to enlarge it, then you need to work out extents and at this point we feel it’s too complicated and technical. See here if you simply want to add a new EXT4 disk without LVM.

Below are the commands used to get the whole operation going.