foone ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I finally lugged my Highscreen SkyTower AT tower up to my office. This machine is beautiful, even when it's yellowed and dusty and grimy and rusty.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

and yeah, it's got a sliding door in case you need to hide your drives!

And good god, look at how many bays this has.
2x 3.5", 5 5.25". It's amazing.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

check it out: screwless entry. it has a handle you just slide to open it.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

it's even got a drive in it! and it's not locked! yay. These caddies are too small for the usual tubular lock impressioning tools so they're a pain to pick. It's usually just easier to disassemble the fucker.

It's a Seagate ST32120A, 2111 MB

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

my got-damn JPEGifer is broken again. why am I uploading big PNGs?

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

okay I had to take an hour long break to fix pastejpeg.

Here's the insides!

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

CPU!
It's a A80502-100 SX963: A 100mhz Pentium 1, bus speed of 50 or 66 mhz.

This is post-FDIV fix. Boooo.

18+ foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar
foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Okay, fan and heatsink cleaned up. Fan tested, and reattached.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

bah. my battery box has gone missing. I can't find my CR2032s

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I pulled out the Rustmaster 9000 PSU. This is not getting tested, it's going directly back into the swamp from whence it came

The front of an AT PSU, the grille for the speaker has rust and dust and grime all around it

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Darn. My clean PSU isn't gonna fit into this case, the fan + power plugs are at the wrong location. I'll have to pull another one from my Car Fulla AT Towers.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

But in the meantime, lemme just grab a modern PSU and my ATX2AT

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Putting a modern gamer-black PSU in a classic AT tower is just wrong.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Hmm. Nothing from the motherboard: It doesn't ever init the VGA. I'm gonna need to find my POST card. Hoping it's just one of those units that won't power on without a CMOS battery

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

ooh cool, I was able to get the picante CR2032s!

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Darn. No luck with the CR2032s. There's a possibly my VGA display is broken (it's acting weird) but there's no beeps.

I'll have to pull the other expansion cards in case they're dead, but I'm all dusted-out today

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

okay I pulled the cards.

We've got a 3com EtherLink-IIII, a 3C509B-IP.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

And the modem is a Diamond SupraExpress 144i PnP. 14,400bps of blinding speed.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

And our video card is a STB Systems Horizon+ PCI, built around a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430.

This is a 2D accelerator with an entire megabyte of VRAM.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Good news! yanking the modem/network card (and reseating the VGA card) made it work. Beeps and boots and everything!

I did run into a minor problem with my portable VGA monitor. uhhhhhh

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

okay I spent a few minutes swearing at the bad menu system on this monitor and it turns out it's broken so that you can't mirror it left or right, it's always mirrored, but the left/right mirroring does turn off if you flip it vertically. So I did, and just rotated the monitor upside down. I guess that works.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I'm trying to dump the drives before I do anything with this machine and one of them has broken DMA. It's really annoying because I can't seem to turn it off, and every time I google it I get results from 2002 saying "the old way doesn't work anymore", which doesn't give me any reason to expect it'll work in 2024

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

there are 900 ways to disable DMA and none of them work

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

so the 2gig drive is still failing to work, but I imaged the 500mb drive, and it turns out this thing was running NT4.

So I was correct! This machine smelled like NT4, and I was proven right.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

it seems it was running InterMail Post.Office, a mail server for small ISPs

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

yeah, the other drive was kinda working before, but I couldn't get DMA to turn off, and now it's completely failed.

ata5.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x2)

shame.

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

from what I did get off, it looks like the removable 2gig drive stored the websites this thing hosted.
and it was used at some point in 2007

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I did manage to get it starting to scrape the 2gig drive.
ddrescue has been running for 78 minutes and has saved 716kb.

So, it'll finish around March 24th

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

left it running overnight and I'm now up to 6.6mb recovered!

also it slowed down. It's going to finish around July 7th

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

hooking up a mastodon bot to post whenever it updates

currently at 7036k

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@hennichodernich found an advert for (almost) this exact model!

https://radiosocial.de/@hennichodernich/112050921975858783

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I paused it to implement some tmux nonsense so I could actually make this bot if I want to, which made it slow down.

So now it's estimating it'll be done August 15...

2028

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

it has somehow sped up to the point where it thinks it'll finish within the next 2 hours, despite having only copied 2.48% (51mb) of the drive. It's getting an average read rate of 510 bytes a second

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I wonder if I could adjust the IDE timeout without having to recompile my kernel

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I made a program to scrape the status from ddrescue, just in time for it to error out and drop the drive from the bus:

Copied 52400 kB of 2048 mB (2.48%) at an average rate of 501 B/s. ETA: 1h 27m

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I was able to do the trick I did before where I repeatedly reset the SCSI host device until it is recognized.

the problem is that it keeps falling right back off the bus when I try to run ddrescue

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

sdb: detected capacity change from 2111864832 to 0

awww, my bytes are gone

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

oops. I accidentally hotplugged the hard drive

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I dunno why this drive isn't working

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

ok I'm officially giving up on this drive.

I was able, in the end, to capture about 54mb of the drive. 2.48%

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I was able to get info and find out that this machine hosted this website at some point in 2005:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040325064945/http://www.windowsacademy.net/

foone OP ,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I realized I need a serial mouse to reinstall NT4 onto this machine. but that shouldn't be a problem, right? I've got a whole drawer of old mice, I just need to grab the first serial mouse out of there.

This was the first one I found.

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