Tried to prepare an ancient MFM hard drive Seagate ST-412 and use them as a primary disk for my IBM 5160.
Unfortunately it is not in a good shape at I expect when I bought it. At least it can spin, and heads are alive. Heads were not in park position when I got it.
Taking into consideration that it cross half of the world, maybe the whole result is not so bad )
I was able to low level format it and check it with the Spinrite tool (see results on photos below). There are a lot of bad sectors, located at the beginning of the disk. May be this is the reason that I am unable to boot from it. I am using IBM PC-DOS 3 .
Will continue with this exercises tomorrow.

I learned how to network boot DOS from my NetWare server! Turns out AMD provided a generic PCnet NetWare Boot ROM for download which you can just plug into VirtualBox. Then with the right configuration on the NetWare server:

You can even configure a list of boot images for so when network boot starts it lets you pick which image to boot from:

Now I'm going to have to dig through my box of NICs sometime to see if I've got any with a Boot ROM installed so I can do this with real hardware. Could be a cheaper option than CF-to-IDE adapters and one that isn't subject to BIOS disk size limits . Sadly the NICs with boot ROMs I have handy at the moment are DEC ones that only support booting from a VAX so not much use for this.

Fitted the second brake disk and front brake caliper assy the my 1976 Honda CB550F Super Sport. Euro, Asian and down under models had the appropriate caliper mounting lugs on the right hand side lower front fork assy. North Amerian/Canadian models didn't.

That's a gorgeous motor bike.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-10-27, 03:54:

That's a gorgeous motor bike.

Cheers. I've owned her since 1986.

I wont let any "Qualified" motorcycle mechanic any where near her 😀

Shouldn't these last posts be in Milliways\What do you drive? or something?
Seems kind of off-topic in 'General Old Hardware\'.

Cleaned and old Power Mac G4.
It was so filthy inside it took me forever as I had to disassemble it.
Tried changing the graphics card but I had none compatible. Stuck with an ATI Rage PRO 128. Didn't know you need a mac version to work.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-10-27, 14:06:

Shouldn't these last posts be in Milliways\What do you drive? or something?
Seems kind of off-topic in 'General Old Hardware\'.

Be there done that already 😉

Upgraded a 2012 Lenovo ThinkCentre with SSD, as a friend's relative wants a low-cost computer for simple web browsing and watching streaming video. Win7 SP1 was installed in just 15 minutes, yet the following ~200 critical updates took me another 5 hours (and counting). 🙄

For the record, it took me two DAYS finishing all updates when I installed Win7 on the same machine with HDD last year.

dormcat wrote on 2021-10-27, 15:44:

Upgraded a 2012 Lenovo ThinkCentre with SSD, as a friend's relative wants a low-cost computer for simple web browsing and watching streaming video. Win7 SP1 was installed in just 15 minutes, yet the following ~200 critical updates took me another 5 hours (and counting). 🙄

For the record, it took me two DAYS finishing all updates when I installed Win7 on the same machine with HDD last year.

You're a saint!

dormcat wrote on 2021-10-27, 15:44:

Upgraded a 2012 Lenovo ThinkCentre with SSD, as a friend's relative wants a low-cost computer for simple web browsing and watching streaming video. Win7 SP1 was installed in just 15 minutes, yet the following ~200 critical updates took me another 5 hours (and counting). 🙄

For the record, it took me two DAYS finishing all updates when I installed Win7 on the same machine with HDD last year.

5 hours? Two days ??

Has MS crippled their servers for Win7 or are you using a dial up modem there, even if this is vogons it's still ok to use modern conveniences occasionally 😉

davidrg wrote on 2021-10-27, 00:46:

Sadly the NICs with boot ROMs I have handy at the moment are DEC ones that only support booting from a VAX so not much use for this.

Gut feeling on that, is that one of the BSDs might offer a way to emulate Vaxen for that purpose, just the boot protocol. However, I have seen DEC DE220s I think they were with netware ROMs, so if you haven't checked part numbers specifically, then they might not all be for VAX.

Sombrero wrote on 2021-10-27, 16:40:

5 hours? Two days ??

Has MS crippled their servers for Win7 or are you using a dial up modem there, even if this is vogons it's still ok to use modern conveniences occasionally 😉

Some updates conflict with other updates so I have to restart and recheck updates repeatedly. Downloading doesn't take much time; installing does, as TrustedInstaller is notorious of eating up system resources (both CPU and HDD/SSD). Not to mention that I encountered error 80072EFE at the very beginning this time.

dormcat wrote on 2021-10-27, 17:18:

Sombrero wrote on 2021-10-27, 16:40:

5 hours? Two days ??

Has MS crippled their servers for Win7 or are you using a dial up modem there, even if this is vogons it's still ok to use modern conveniences occasionally 😉

Some updates conflict with other updates so I have to restart and recheck updates repeatedly. Downloading doesn't take much time; installing does, as TrustedInstaller is notorious of eating up system resources (both CPU and HDD/SSD). Not to mention that I encountered error 80072EFE at the very beginning this time.

WSUS Offline Updater (the ESR version) might do the job more efficiently, I think it skips all the ones that are superseded by another update and probably installs them all with less hassle.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-10-27, 16:42:

davidrg wrote on 2021-10-27, 00:46:

Sadly the NICs with boot ROMs I have handy at the moment are DEC ones that only support booting from a VAX so not much use for this.

Gut feeling on that, is that one of the BSDs might offer a way to emulate Vaxen for that purpose, just the boot protocol. However, I have seen DEC DE220s I think they were with netware ROMs, so if you haven't checked part numbers specifically, then they might not all be for VAX.

These are properly old ones - the DE200 (aka DEPCA Turbo, EtherWORKS Turbo). They came from the factory with a Boot ROM that speaks only the DEC Maintenance Operations Protocol (MOP). There is a MOP server for Linux and BSD (I've used it in the past for booting an old terminal server from the mid 80s) but the challenge would be what to serve up from it. Ideally some image that just turns around and tries to do an RPL boot. I think some version of Pathworks for OpenVMS came with such an image but that would require a license.

The DE220 Boot ROMs should certainly work but they were also optional add-on so a bit less likely to find a card equipped with one.

Did some cleaning on the DataExpert board (needs some work still, but it's getting closer).

Gallery: http://imgur.com/a/ILtXlYw

Today I finished with the TNT2 M64. I find it interesting how close it is in early games (GLQuake, Quake 2, Prince of Persia 3D, Need for Speed 4) to the full TNT2. It really isn't until very post-2000 games Like Medal of Honor Allied Assault and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 when the card really starts to suffer because of its memory bandwidth.

I've also tried to get something out of the Permedia 2 which came from a Sun server. I could make the test system boot if there is another graphics card with it (the M64), the system detects it, this driver installs, but I still can't get it to draw anything onto my screen.

Some time ago I've seen a topic on this forum where someone had the exact same card and managed to make it work, but I don't seem to have the same luck. What I get from there, with the drivers installed, it should post after Windows loaded, but mine doesn't. And the system won't boot if the Permedia is the only graphics card it has. Any tips?

andrea wrote on 2021-10-25, 17:30:

Of course I'm never going to open them up, I'm talking "software" fixing. But not nonsense like HDD Regenerator and the like, bu […]
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pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-25, 17:13:

I caution to anyone, replacing failed components on a hard drive is dandy but many has firmware kept in a large chipset. Ot […]
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I caution to anyone, replacing failed components on a hard drive is dandy but many has firmware kept in a large chipset. Other than that, cannot open the internal guts where platters are.
The data recovery vendors who do heads swap consider this data recovery only. Once done it is trashed.

The software that scan and marks them bad is not recommended either and wastes time.

If I find any issues and with good back up habits, you can just toss and get another.

Cheers,

Of course I'm never going to open them up, I'm talking "software" fixing.
But not nonsense like HDD Regenerator and the like, but at firmware level.

Most of my drives are WD, so I can do the following:

A few bad sectors? Self Scan it
More bad sectors? ARCO
Got a bad head? disable it.

To the best of my knowledge an ARCO test should be the same thing the factory does when they recertify RMA returns.

Now, the usefulness of a 4 head 500GB so degraded that after ARCO qualified as a 2 head 160GB disk is debatable, but the fact that I can is more important to me.

hdd regenerator saved my butt many, many times with customer HDD's. Its not a permanent solution if you have bad sectors at the start of the HDD, but it helps to read a damaged partition or patch an HDD with some bad sectors and still use it

been using the 1.71 version for almost 10 years, its a shame that it is DOS only and cannot boot from the rescue disk in moderm computers (memory problems with the emulation and boot)

Tonight I completely disassembled my HP m8000 media center PC so I can clean everything up real thoroughly and tidy things up before listing it for sale. This thing had so much dust on the inside when I got it I couldn't believe it. I've never seen such a grotesque accumulation of dust in my life. Wish I had taken a "before" picture but I was impatient. Such is me.

Introduced C# generics (which appeared in 2005) to a code base that predates them.