Yup, that one ;D If my hard drives don't blow up (the Travelstar reached 60°C this week!), i should have ended with this one in early 2008 (if i have luck downloading the raws).
Now, back to business... time for
"Quantum Quest" (sponsored by Seagate-Maxtor-Quantum-Conner(tm)!
This drive and this SCSI card are plain funky: Windows sometimes fails to initialize the card, and the drive seems to dissapear after a soft reboot. Also i got system hangs with Adaptec EZ-SCSI tools, but these are the pics of the one and only sucessful run (ah, due to the extra drivers and hardware, Windows 95 is even slower on boot... at least 5 minutes!):
(WARNING! Lots of pics! Not safe for lowram users with Firefox ;D)- Device manager: note the HP branding. HP stills brand their drives into the firmware.
- Drive features (courtesy of SCSI Interrogator)
- This drive had a HUGE factory defect list (Plist), and some bad blocks into the Glist, so my "bad sectors" nightmares came true:
- Two pics of DOS FORMAT: when you see the "trying to recover" messages, you know that your drive is doomed:
- Everything on this box seems to be into "perfect-fit": the Quantum nicely fits below the drive cage holder, but i had to remove the 386 fancooler for make room for the SCSI card:
Experiment result: Mostly a failure... I'm not going to use this drive for install Linux there, so it's time to look for other solutions.
Now, back for the networking experiments, and for more names: the 386 box finally has a nice name: it's now known as
"Marika" (a homage to Marika from Twin Spica, that girl that nobody cared...). This month wallpaper is also from Twin Spica (just managed to find some spares on the net!)
Running PuTTY: Marika now can talk with Saki! (it's slow despite the FPU, and the video card is of no help for scrolling)
I HATE LiteOn optical drives! They're noisy, they fail quite frequently, and they're everywhere! I got this LTN-526S 52X CDROM for repair, with a dead laser, that means that i needed a new pickup for this one (exact model: Sanyo SF-P151). Luckily for me, i had a working SF-P151 pickup from another dead LTN-526S, so after a pickup swap, some cleanup, and some testing, the drive is back to service.
No CD repair workshop is complete with the regulatory MOVE CD
(BTW: don't waste your time downloading "Deep Calm", is pure crap, better go for "BOULDER" or "Speed Master"). Marika served as the test bench:
Oh, that was my KNOPPIX disc! (needed for test CD-ROM reading) IE 3 does not support PNG nor CSS, so all help pages on this disc are unreadable.
The
Horror Tale of the Week(tm), sponsored by
PCCHIPS 
A friend had a M748 that needed service. This box had an odd setup:
- 384 megs of RAM
- Celeron 600 (YUCK!!!)
- SiS 620 chipset
- PCI Radeon 7000 with 64megs of VRAM, TV-out and DVI. Too good for this piece of crap! Expensive as hell, and damn difficult to find one, but here is it...
- Quantum Fireball lct15 (30GB): 4400 RPM??? Is this a bad joke? That thing is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!
- Toshiba-Samsung combo DVD/CDRW
- Yet another LiteOn LTN-526S
One of the RAM modules was fried (it was a brand-new 256MB PC133 DIMM, ouch!), the onboard NIC was also busted (and since he had the Radeon using the only PCI slot on this mobo, this box will never be able to surf the net unless you toss the Radeon, and use the onboard SiS 620 videocrap). I would toss the entire box into the nearest dumpster
Misc photos from the workshop:
- My old Oak Technology OTI-077 ISA videocard with 256K(?) of VRAM (the same chip is on my 386). Still works, but the OTI-077 is pure crap (just do a DIR into a folder full of files, and have fun of the slooooooow drawing speed, EVEN on a Pentium box!)
- Rare videocards from the workshop, from right to left:
* PCI Radeon 7000 (64MB)
* Generic PCI Trident 9440 (2MB) (OK, this one is not rare at all)
* Generic 16-bit ISA OAK OTI-077 (256K?)
- Remember that Amptron PM9100 from the water bucket? It stills want to work, but dies quickly after a few power cycles. Ah, that video card is the Radeon 7000! At least i can see the POST messages... (BTW: how would fit that Radeon into Saki? Reserved for a future experiment!)
- These are not the Spicas, but a couple of LEDs from my 386 box (er, Marika). The red one is an activity led from the SCSI card.
- The entire Fireball lct family is now blacklisted here (even the Bigfoot is more reliable!). i had to perform data recovery on this one (a slighty corrupted NTFS partition, with 8 gigs of warez, pr0n and MP3 that needed recovery). It took 2 HOURS to extract such data, at less than 1MB/s. Even when blanking the drive, it's ridiculous slow! And it's not a fresh drive too! (well, in Puerto Ordaz, no harddrive runs cool, even Spinpoints!). Weird bit: The Maxtor DiamondMax D540X was a 5th generation Fireball lct (the lct40 series), but at 5400 RPM (and the D740X was to be the Fireball Plus VQ)
- Current status of the recording studio. This photo was at 7:15 AM, while recording a Detective Loki episode. And no, the stack has not collapsed yet. Hail to the cardboard milk boxes!
- NO COMMENTS ;D
(save for the dumbass that ruined the borders of the cover with a rusted paper guillotine in the print shop)
And that was the report for this week. Stay tuned for more experiments!
Now, working with another "mystery" series. The only clue is that the main character is called "Loki". Now, solve that mistery! (and yes, it's a anime about detectives, mysteries, and such crap)
