Adventures with the Nixdorf 8870 Mini-Computer
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Very slow progress...

13/6/2012

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It’s been a difficult couple of days trying to get the M25 running with the drive from Jim.

It did boot when I placed it in my chassis but it complained about the memory size and then started picking up housekeeping errors and deleting files. This is a common story with these drives when they’ve been left idle for many years.

The system eventually booted and I was pleasantly surprised to see it was running Niros 7.0/03

Attempting to log-in using the administrator password failed with password not recognised. The Manager and Expert logins worked ok, but not the administrator. I’ve tried every password I can think off but so far, I’ve not been able to figure it out. Without the admin password, I can’t reconfigure the system with SYSMOD/CONFPROG and because Niros is running its emergency minimum configuration, many programs won’t run correctly and the system is very slow. I also don’t have any printer support.

So, I decided to carry on with the tasks that I should be able to complete; backup up the drive to SMC as it’s a forgone conclusion that this drive will fail sooner rather than later.

The first problem with this task is which SMC tape is required. I’ve been accumulating every type of SMC tape I can find and I’ve now got a box full of them.

I first tried an XLP300 tape. The system really didn’t seem to like this. Next I tried a DC600A and I had a lot more success with this.

I managed to format the SMC, and then set about running a backup of LU#0. At 9 minutes and 5 seconds, the progress counter reset, and started again. It did this a total of four times before announcing that there was a disk error.

I tried another SMC just in case but it threw the same error at the same point in time.

The error shows three numbers and I assumed that one of them was the disk address giving the trouble.

I decided to copy all none operating system files off LU#0 onto LU#1 and hopefully leave LU#0 with just the basic operating system hoping that I would encounter errors whilst moving one of the files and that would show me the exact location of the disk error. Unfortunately this didn’t happen. All files were copied and then delete successfully.

I then took a gamble and ran OPINDEX on LU#0. This ran without any errors.

I tried the backup to SMC again, but I’m still getting the read/write error.

The good news is that the system continues to boot without throwing any housekeeping errors.

I’ve sent some Emails to people and am waiting to see if anybody knows what the admin password may be for this system.

I’ve got more screen-shots that I will upload soon.
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    I'm a software developer, an engineer and I love vintage computers, but the 8870 has a very special place in my heart.

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