foone

foone , 3 months ago to random

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 , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

okay I pulled the cards.

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

foone OP , 3 months ago

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

foone OP , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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

foone OP , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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

foone OP , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

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 , 3 months ago

hooking up a mastodon bot to post whenever it updates

currently at 7036k