Tandon TM 502

[Tony Duell]

> It's pushing 10 years since I got rid of my Sirii, but IIRC the hard drive 
> and controller board are mounted in such a way that the cabling between them 
> is inaccessible when they are mounted in the machine.

My memory of working on the Sirius is that it was made to be easy for 
board-swappers (you almost never had to remove screws, only loosen them, 
etc, and very difficult for real repairers (when the machine was 
assembled you could get to vritually nothing, cables weren't long enough 
to set it up in bits, and so on. Not quite as bad as the DEC Rainbow, but 
close.

> 
> The only way to work on the hard drive is to remove it from the metal 
> assembly carrying the drives and prop it up somewhere close bye; in fact 
> there should be no problem with removing the entire "drive carrier" and 
> reconnecting the hard drive alone (I'm sure I did this with mine when I was 
> tinkering with it).

If the hard disk is a standard ST412 interface (and I am darn sure it is, 
even though I've never seen one), I would guess you could use somewhat 
longer cabels to link it up for testing. Then at least you could have the 
drive itself alongside the machine so you could stick a probe on the 
trstpoints.

-tony