Recycled some ISA slots from a definitely broken Socket 3 mainboard (FUBAR - massive battery corrosion, missing chips, the chipset had broken pins). I will maybe use them to make a riser.

FaSMaN wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I have found 3 broken drives already, what do you guys do with those? Just throw em out? Rip out the magnets? Any fun experiments?

I just Run HDD Regenerator from within hirens, sometimes you can get lucky and its just a few bad sectors, so far its saved atleast two of 120GB HDDs , the ones it couldnt went for recycling 😒

Before they go for recycling, be sure to disassemble them for some magnet action!

gdjacobs wrote:

FaSMaN wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I have found 3 broken drives already, what do you guys do with those? Just throw em out? Rip out the magnets? Any fun experiments?

I just Run HDD Regenerator from within hirens, sometimes you can get lucky and its just a few bad sectors, so far its saved atleast two of 120GB HDDs , the ones it couldnt went for recycling 😒

Before they go for recycling, be sure to disassemble them for some magnet action!

https://professormungleton.blogspot.com/2012/ … ersonality.html

Dug into my new systems a bit today. Ecs P4 is a big mystery. Dont get a vga signal. But my testing monitor is a bit dodgy and doesnt like some pcs. Antec p4 has a 380 watt antec with popped fuhgyuus all over the place. Have a feeling that is why it barely starts and i dont get a video signal

Guys, I see you are talking good about those USB IDE adaptors, but be aware, they are not working like they supposed to. I have at least twenty hard drives that seems like dead to the usb thingy, but really they are in mint condition. IBM harddrives doesn't work, some Quantum too (it usually address clusters over the max, so ends up grinding heads, have two completely broken ones and one behaving veeeery strangely - it looks like it calibrates not on track, but between the tracks. All of them were good until I connected them to that stupid thing. And I don't have cheap one, it cost almost 120 bucks four years ago.) and older Seagates are not working too. Don't try to connect ZIP or other interchangeable media to it aside from CD/DVD drives, they work. I just don't want to see more broken Quantum drives, it tears my heart apart, because I just love the sound of these drives, they are soooo lovely.

And because I don't want to be OT, today I fired up my K6 machine, plugged in MFM controller and checked my Seagate ST-125 drive with DrHardware, CheckIt and finally SpinRite. I love that drive, it sounds sooooo lovely. I don't know, I can be weird, but in my opinion old computer has to be heard when doing something. If not, it is not true old computer. That is why I hate that stupid CF card thingies. Yes, they are awesome, but NOT in old PCs! 😀

Cleaned up and tinkered with some more boards but as usual some are picky with the cards I have 😒

Thanks for the insight. My results aren't that bad. I have found that setting the jumpers on the drive in different ways sometimes helps (sometimes Master works, sometimes Cable Select). Also the sequence of plugging in the various connectors can make a difference. I put the gadget in the drive first, then I put the power supply in the drive, then I put the USB in the computer. I always use the Safely remove... option in Windows. I use Windwos 10 Pro, fast ring release so pretty beta sometimes.

I have some Maxtor MaXLine Plus II and Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drives that would not go any faster than exectly 33.3 MB/s in HDTune. Those drives also overheat when testing (althought that could also be because they're not in a case so they cannot transfer heat to the chassis. Or it could be that Maxtor drives are crap 😉 All other drives worked fine, and that includes really quite old Fujitsu's and Seagate Medalists.

This gadget was a cheap one, about 20 euro.

krivulak wrote:

Guys, I see you are talking good about those USB IDE adaptors, but be aware, they are not working like they supposed to. I have at least twenty hard drives that seems like dead to the usb thingy, but really they are in mint condition. IBM harddrives doesn't work, some Quantum too (it usually address clusters over the max, so ends up grinding heads, have two completely broken ones and one behaving veeeery strangely - it looks like it calibrates not on track, but between the tracks. All of them were good until I connected them to that stupid thing. And I don't have cheap one, it cost almost 120 bucks four years ago.) and older Seagates are not working too. Don't try to connect ZIP or other interchangeable media to it aside from CD/DVD drives, they work. I just don't want to see more broken Quantum drives, it tears my heart apart, because I just love the sound of these drives, they are soooo lovely.

...

I have used the last two day's installing a lightweight Linux distro, on a Packard Bell laptop.
I don't know how old it is, can only say that it is running a Sempron mobile 3000-something, one gig of ram and has a S3 Chrome something pro something onboard gfx. And yes... The S3/Via gfx are all to blame for my woes. After 5, maby 6, installation tries that failed, I probed the gfx and found the source of my woes.

Now... I solved the problem, by installing gtk of some sort, by searching for "Unichrome" in the synaptic package manager. That I had to install seperately too. No big deal, as there is the console wich can be used to APT-GET the synaptic program. Anyway... I just installed everything (two packages) that had something to do with Unichrome and rebooted the machine. Now it can only use the highest resolution (1024x768), wich are not bad compared to before gtk-something, were it was stuck at 640x468. All this trouble, reminds me of the day's, were I had to dump the firmware or BIOS from wireless broadcom cards, in order to make wifi work on Linux. Lot's of trouble back in the day's....
(Thank you so fu**ing much broadcom, for not open sourcing you'r drivers. Yes you are in lowercase, yes you are. How does it feel broadcom?)

The distro's that I had problem with, was these ones:
- Xubuntu 16.04(no drivers during installation)
- Lubuntu 16.04 (no drivers during installation)
- Ubuntu-Mate 16.04 (no drivers during installation)
- Elementary-OS 0.3.2 (VGA crashes during installation)

adalbert wrote:

Recycled some ISA slots from a definitely broken Socket 3 mainboard (FUBAR - massive battery corrosion, missing chips, the chipset had broken pins). I will maybe use them to make a riser.

Nice....
They might get handy if you venture into some project down the road, or they can be used as spareparts on other boards.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Thanks for the insight. My results aren't that bad. I have found that setting the jumpers on the drive in different ways sometim […]
Show full quote

Thanks for the insight. My results aren't that bad. I have found that setting the jumpers on the drive in different ways sometimes helps (sometimes Master works, sometimes Cable Select). Also the sequence of plugging in the various connectors can make a difference. I put the gadget in the drive first, then I put the power supply in the drive, then I put the USB in the computer. I always use the Safely remove... option in Windows. I use Windwos 10 Pro, fast ring release so pretty beta sometimes.

I have some Maxtor MaXLine Plus II and Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drives that would not go any faster than exectly 33.3 MB/s in HDTune. Those drives also overheat when testing (althought that could also be because they're not in a case so they cannot transfer heat to the chassis. Or it could be that Maxtor drives are crap 😉 All other drives worked fine, and that includes really quite old Fujitsu's and Seagate Medalists.

This gadget was a cheap one, about 20 euro.

krivulak wrote:

Guys, I see you are talking good about those USB IDE adaptors, but be aware, they are not working like they supposed to. I have at least twenty hard drives that seems like dead to the usb thingy, but really they are in mint condition. IBM harddrives doesn't work, some Quantum too (it usually address clusters over the max, so ends up grinding heads, have two completely broken ones and one behaving veeeery strangely - it looks like it calibrates not on track, but between the tracks. All of them were good until I connected them to that stupid thing. And I don't have cheap one, it cost almost 120 bucks four years ago.) and older Seagates are not working too. Don't try to connect ZIP or other interchangeable media to it aside from CD/DVD drives, they work. I just don't want to see more broken Quantum drives, it tears my heart apart, because I just love the sound of these drives, they are soooo lovely.

...

I have even seen drives, that needed the jumpers not to be installed and in one rare case were slave had to be selected.
Most often, it is no-jumper that results in the drive being able to be used on a USB-Adaptor.
That is, when master and cable selct are not working, and most of the times on laptop drives.

Spent last night swapping out the AWE32 with another on my DECpc 433dxlp machine. I was getting weird FM playback issues on the original card, whereby it would work fine in DIAGNOSE, but when playing a game that was apparently configured correctly, there would be no music playback, only digital effects. Once I swapped the card out, everything worked fine. Anyone else have a similar experience?

Also, I dug up an iomega zip 100 drive (external LPT) and got it running the same machine and made a backup of most of the HDD, pending a format and reinstall. Something is buggy about the drive because while it works perfectly fine, when I surface scan the drive in scandisk, at a certain point every single cluster is coming up as a bad sector. I suspect the drive is perfectly fine, but something is totally wrong with its configuration and it's just throwing errors. Eh, a reinstall is always fun anyway, might as well try it 🤣

Swapping the weird one to the DECpc, does it work better?

gdjacobs wrote:

Swapping the weird one to the DECpc, does it work better?

You mean, put the weird AWE32 back in and test it again? I'll try that asap! Good idea...

orinoko wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Swapping the weird one to the DECpc, does it work better?

You mean, put the weird AWE32 back in and test it again? I'll try that asap! Good idea...

I understand now. You changed the AWE32 in your DECpc. I read it as you having borrowed an AWE32 from your DECpc for another machine. I was wondering if the original card might work in a different machine, perhaps there was some kind of resource conflict.

I've been testing some Socket 7 boards, most of them dead unfortunately. After I finished, I removed the VGA I was using for testing (a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro - Virge/DX) and noticed a couple of dodgy legs in the main chip. I was concerned the legs may short, so I used a small needle to straighten them up, and the card now outputs beautiful artifacts. 😒

I guess I must have broken one of the legs when I peformed the "fix" 😢

Anyway, you know the old adage, "If it ain't broke..."

Preped my piii system for sale/replacement. Got everything moved onto a backup drive and pulled all the hardware and listed it. I can honestly say it will be missed but I will not be looking back. A dual 604 setup will take its place!
I ordered the heatsinks (noctua sinks with 92mm fans) and ram. (Kingston hypers cl2.5) and bid on a mobo.

Not computer related. I am cooking rose hip jam, using the fruits from wild roses.

Attempted to work on a laptop for a friend of mine. Windows 7 reinstall went smooth (xp laptop so i guess it counts as retro right?) windows update took 12 hours to get halfway through and managed to kill the Windows install. . .grrr

gdjacobs wrote:

orinoko wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Swapping the weird one to the DECpc, does it work better?

You mean, put the weird AWE32 back in and test it again? I'll try that asap! Good idea...

I understand now. You changed the AWE32 in your DECpc. I read it as you having borrowed an AWE32 from your DECpc for another machine. I was wondering if the original card might work in a different machine, perhaps there was some kind of resource conflict.

Ah! Well in any case, what I thought was your idea - reinstalling the original (weird) AWE32 back into the DECpc and testing to see if FM music was playing in games - actually worked!

I don't know what it is, the jumpers are identical between the two boards, and DIAGNOSE performed exactly the same way on both boards - they aren't PNP either, and I have not changed anything in the BIOS setup, so it was surprising when last night I ran Skyroads and the oh-so-familiar intro music played and the spaceship roared by! So thank you for the suggestion! I thought the card was faulty, but it certainly isn't 😊

Oh and then I formatted the hard drive. Weird thing is, this drive is the original drive for the machine - from 1992 I believe. I was having bad sector issues when doing a surface scan in scandisk. The drive would scan fine up until a point and then suddenly every single cluster would come up as a bad sector. I thought it was a bit odd so I booted up DOS 6.22 setup, went to fdisk, noticed that the drive size reported by fdisk was ~462MB, but there was a 2047MB primary partition, and a ~320MB extended partition on the drive! No wonder it was having issues with 'bad sectors' - the sectors it was trying to address didn't exist! haha.

So yeah, removed the partitions, added a new one to the correct size, formatted it, installed DOS, realised it was 1am and decided I probably should sleep...

Today I officially became a member of Vogons. 🤣
Seems like everyone here goes mad over these generic early 90's AT cases and at long last I found one at the local recycling center. 😁

When I first got it I figured I'd have a 486 with a leaky CMOS battery, or at very least a filthy 486 or Pentium machine. However when I got it home and popped it open I was greeted with this sight!
(Of course the pic was taken after I started to remove components so I could clean the case)

I think I'm going to set this motherboard aside (it works perfectly) for use later and substitute one of my Socket 7 Baby AT motherboards since it would fit better in the case and also be more appropriate for the time period of the case (not really but it's closer ok! Geeze).

This is the case after a through cleaning with hot water dish soap, a scrub pad, dry cloth and a toothbrush. 😁 I can't wait to get this guy up and running again. 🤣

Having built a modern sleeper myself I just couldn't help but share this one. It's just too cool that I stumbled onto someones old sleeper computer. 😁