Yah I just let small amounts of randoms accumulate over long periods without worrying, if they cluster though, that's a surface damage indication, and if I desperately need to keep using that disk I will partition them out. (Put partition above and below and leave that "cylinder" or two unallocated and hopefully unaccessed) Probably I'll call something "done" when it's got randoms in the hundreds even if there are no spreading patches. Unless it's a unicorn drive, (XTs, early ATs, laptops with limited types etc) then it's just a case of running it and crossing your fingers, while not having any unique data kept on it.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but to use a "really spotty" drive, unless the CPU is hoplessly weak in it's class, I will make a compressed volume on the drive. Then scan disk it a few times... if errors keep happening, there's not much hope, but they typically limit to a couple of passes as the CVF settles in. But, what you've got here now is an extra layer of error detection/compensation/correction. This is all from experience by the way with being broke through the 90s when storage prices were insane capacities miniscule and I bought junk box hard drives for pocket change and tried to get use out of them.

I've added the full version of the Canopus Pure3D II to keep the back of my closet from falling in. This one appears unused. All cables are factory sealed; no dust or marks on the card/connectors, either. All functions/Glide/Direct3D/SLI, etc. tested OK. I thought the fan was dead, but it only activates once a Direct3D/Glide application is engaged. Nice!

I passed up on an auction a few years ago that had a matching set of Pure3D with the NVIDIA pass through. I regret not buying it. Oh well.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-07, 02:02:

I passed up on an auction a few years ago that had a matching set of Pure3D with the NVIDIA pass through. I regret not buying it. Oh well.

I remember a 5-6 years ago more than one Canopus Pure3D (V1 and V2 models) showed up on ebay for I think ~$80-$100 each, sealed in box. At the time I was like "ehh... they must not be that rare if there are that many on here for this price. I don't need to spend $100 right now..." ... then they were gone, and within a year, every Canopus branded product for PC was inexplicably selling for three to five times as much as identical products from other brands.

I see now that a bare Pure3D with no cable sold for $300 recently. Durrr.... 🤪

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-03-06, 18:04:

Makavre wrote on 2023-03-06, 17:10:

ediflorianUS wrote on 2023-03-06, 16:55:

I was just entering the arena , usually I use them externally on my Pre 2007 or pre 2003 systems. Hope I can get one working for the 486 on usb. I remember 2003 was such a big deal SATA =)) who knew it was slower than PATA133 I already had. I don't have velociraptors (raptors) , but they are cheap , I can get 7$/piece with warranty at local seller. These days its difficult (for me) to find stuff pre 2k year. So I just buy what I can at the local flea market... 4xhdds was 80 lei (that's 17$ us) - 2x1 tb 3.5" and 2x2.5" (one is 500g other 120g) , they do seem to have some bad sectors ,however for game stuff and music is supper ok. (for rest I have new stuff).

Bad sectors are usually recoverable, as I had a few drives myself which reported failed health (bad sectors) but if you look hard enough, there's a couple of programs out there which help recover such issues. The first one that comes to mind is actually called HDD regenerator (Google it) or HDD Sentinel (quite popular).

Those programs force HDD to use its repair mechanism and remap bad sectors using spare space. After the procedure drive is "healthy", but slower (additional seeks when encountering remapped sectors) and suspect (why did bad sector show up in the first place? failing head? contamination wracking havoc on disk surface?). Sometimes its fine and drives with few remapped sectors work like champs for years and years, other times its a sign drive is about to fail completely.
TLDR: those programs cant do magic, they can only trigger drive self preservation mode 😀

Do anyone know if I turn off SMART , and use programs on them will it record in hidden part of hdd the errors?(read)? Will try to use original app from hdd + testing apps to format and Spinrite ... I am just curious if I do some recovery partition stuff before using this programs , will it affect the hdd by writing the bad sectors to hidden part. and if I use the hdd on external enclosure most test (in hdd Tune) fine and smart is off. I just don't know .... sometimes even if you CHKDSK the drive it will hide the unreadable sectors. Hey it's only for moving nonimportant data, from one to other so it's not that big deal if it fails ,eventually, anyway, (I only had one drive fail on me once , st500 dm002 -kc45 chinese , the only one that died during running in a blazing head crash). Any other drive I come across failed previously or still starts. (and I have about 100).

bestemor , I saved 2x80 gb EDIE just by formatting it for win98 , they would refuse to run in NTFS no matter what app I tried , run fine with win98 and fat32 (bizarre) but they work , no problems. Maxtor and samsung. same with a seagate500 laptop edition , could not format it in any other format than FAT32 or EXFAT (used exfat as it was 500g). it works if its Exfat , i can use xcopy to copy files , any other way or on mac or anything I tried would not create mbr or partition , so I decided to give up and leave it at ExFAT , I know it's going out , but it holds data, still ,so it's good where it is as a backup drive for music in a dual hdd laptop.

ediflorianUS wrote on 2023-03-07, 09:20:

Do anyone know if I turn off SMART

you wont, you can turn off SMART error reporting at BOOT by motherboard BIOS, but that has nothing to do with the HDD itself 😀

ediflorianUS wrote on 2023-03-07, 09:20:

and use programs on them will it record in hidden part of hdd the errors?(read)? Will try to use original app from hdd + testing apps to format and Spinrite

spinrite is scam, this program worked as advertised only on old MFM drives. just dont
if you want to play with low level drive fixing try Victoria https://hdd.by/victoria/ program itself is in English

ediflorianUS wrote on 2023-03-07, 09:20:

... I am just curious if I do some recovery partition stuff before using this programs , will it affect the hdd by writing the bad sectors to hidden part. and if I use the hdd on external enclosure most test (in hdd Tune) fine and smart is off. I just don't know .... sometimes even if you CHKDSK the drive it will hide the unreadable sectors.

dont quite understand what you mean. Any modern drive might try to remap when encountering unreadable sector, and will remap when forced to by writing to unreadable sector.

ok thank you , I did reset smart a few times ,on different drives, you just need to low-lvl format the drive under parted magic or other ap's that sends command to reset the drive to factory settings, and there is MHDD that can modify smart also. (if the drive has problems error's reoccurs anyway's)

Today's find is this GIGABYTE GV-R92518DE AGP 8X graphics card, a ATI Radeon 9250 with 128MB video RAM. Any opinions?

RetroPC_King wrote on 2023-03-07, 12:29:

Today's find is this GIGABYTE GV-R92518DE AGP 8X graphics card, a ATI Radeon 9250 with 128MB video RAM. Any opinions?

To be honest, yes.
I mostly collect ATI cards, i loved ATI... but i hate that card. A lot (but i think i have one)

In my opinion, it's nearly a scam by ATI.
Using their numbering to make this card to looks like a midrange while its a very low performer.

ATI previously used a numbering schema that was quite clear :

• Radeon 7XXX -> DirectX 7
• Radeon 8XXX -> DirectX 8
• Radeon 9XXX -> DirectX 9

But by late 2002, they started to change a bit their rules with the Radeon 9000.
This is a DirectX 8 card, based on the previous generation. But at least, the number 9000 was very low compared to 9500/9700 (True DX9), and this suggested a low-end card. But it's not super fair to change the rules.

But in 2003 and 2004, ATI introduced more cards breaking this numbering, but also completely blurring the GPU range numbers.

To summarize the mess, this is the correct ordering from top performer to worst performer for ATI R200 range :

• Radeon 8500 (Top performer)
• Radeon 8500LE
• Radeon 9100
• Radeon 9000Pro
• Radeon 9000
• Radeon 9200
• Radeon 9200SE
• Radeon 9250
• Radeon 9250SE (Worst performer)

The numbers are completely disconnected from the relative performances.
How could customers understand that. Higher is the number, lower is the performance !!!

So yes, i hate all R200 based Radeon 9XXX.

I actually feel that the 9250, even the SE, is a solid performer when paired with much slower CPUs, such as the Pentium 2. These systems are usually bottled anyways, and these inexpensive, passively cooled cards work great. I have a couple of them.

I have the same options of the Rage 128, which is my go-to card for testing on AGP boards.

This beauty.

I wonder if it takes the Pentium III Xeon 900/2M ?

JustJulião wrote on 2023-03-07, 16:35:

This beauty.

I wonder if it takes the Pentium III Xeon 900/2M ?

IMG_20230307_165909.jpg

Definitely don't see many of those around. I had to look it up!
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/freeway-atc-6400

Very interesting board.

It could be nothing, but that cap at the top left corner by the kb\m ports has something on the top of it. Might want to check that one out.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-07, 16:42:

Definitely don't see many of those around. I had to look it up! https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/freeway-atc-6400 […]
Show full quote

JustJulião wrote on 2023-03-07, 16:35:

This beauty.

I wonder if it takes the Pentium III Xeon 900/2M ?

IMG_20230307_165909.jpg

Definitely don't see many of those around. I had to look it up!
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/freeway-atc-6400

Very interesting board.

It could be nothing, but that cap at the top left corner by the kb\m ports has something on the top of it. Might want to check that one out.

Yes it works but I'll probably change this one before making further testing.

additionally, I bought this. I'll have to find a battery.
It has the Pentium MMX 300MHz. Still not sure about the graphics chip, maybe a C&T ?
I picked it because it was an excellent deal but I'm more into early 3D games.
So besides strategy 2D games, which Win 9X games would you recommend ? 3D games with good software mode that would run smoothly with a Pentium MMX 300 ? Or maybe point & clicks ? I played only Broken Sword 1 & 2.

I just got this haul today. Nothing superduper interesting, but some "nice to have" type of stuff:

Two 3COM Etherlink III ISA network cards. I have already one in of my 486s, and they are really good for DOS networking IMO. Card below is a VLB IO card.

This one has various IO cards also. Top left is CDROM controller for three CDROM drives (no normal IDE, only proprietary) and lower right is external SCSI controller.

Next is four ISA graphics cards. Top left is early 256k WDC VGA card, nice card for something period correct stuff. I believe top right ATI VGA Wonder+. It is made by Nokia and is most likely from one of their MikroMikko PC computers. Lower cards are Trident dogs, 9000c and 8900c. They are slow as hell, but they still create pixels on the screen and are ISA, so what's to complain!

Bunch of floppy drives from different manufacturers (at least Panasonic, Mitsumi and Samsung). Two has nice 5.25" cages, white one is from some sort of Compaq.

Finally few more drives. One regular CDRW drive. HP drive is SCSI and on the right is Iomega Ditto Max tape drive. Naturally I don't have tape cartridge for that, so I probably need to hunt one from somewhere to test if that bad boy still works. I don't hold my breath as it is Iomega, but maybe their tape stuff was more reliable compared to Zips..?

All in all, nothing earth shattering, but for 30€ not too bad either.

Good deal, not the exciting bits, but the bits that make the exciting bits actually able to do stuff. Funny, just had eyeballs on Etherlink IIs yesterday and wondered if they had a III before they just went to numbering. Double check that top 5.25 faceplate floppy, the eject button is same shape as LS120s

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-08, 16:27:

Double check that top 5.25 faceplate floppy, the eject button is same shape as LS120s

Will do. I admit that I didn't look those through that carefully so it is possible, but I'm 99% sure that it is just a regular floppy. Some Compaqs had those oval shaped floppy drive buttons and for example, I have one 486 which also has button with similar shape. I think that that particular floppy is from a late 90s Deskpro, similar to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Deskpro# … 999_desktop.jpg

Yeah that's probably it, might be that since they sold to compaq later in the 1990s they went with something to please them, fit with Compaq styling, or some externals/white box units were surplus from the Compaq production.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-08, 16:27:

Good deal, not the exciting bits, but the bits that make the exciting bits actually able to do stuff. Funny, just had eyeballs on Etherlink IIs yesterday and wondered if they had a III before they just went to numbering. Double check that top 5.25 faceplate floppy, the eject button is same shape as LS120s

I believe an ls-120 will always have a hole in the eject button to reject manually. Otherwise, the button is just a momentary switch that tells the drive to eject electronically when it's safe to do so.

Someone correct me in I'm wrong. I just haven't seen any variants that ejected manually like a normal floppy.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-03-07, 02:14:

I remember a 5-6 years ago more than one Canopus Pure3D (V1 and V2 models) showed up on ebay for I think ~$80-$100 each, sealed in box. At the time I was like "ehh... they must not be that rare if there are that many on here for this price. I don't need to spend $100 right now..." ... then they were gone, and within a year, every Canopus branded product for PC was inexplicably selling for three to five times as much as identical products from other brands.

I see now that a bare Pure3D with no cable sold for $300 recently. Durrr.... 🤪

I listed one of those v1's in 2015 for $100... because I had bought it a while before that at a thrift for under $10, so it felt like ruthless profiteering even then. 😉

(If I was actually prescient, I would've put the income into nvidia stock then.)