Im rescuing floppies which are so messed up that the floppy drives I usually use wont even format them.

The Samsung SFD-321B /KCP 1.44MB floppy drive I removed from my Compaq Presario K6-2 system turns out to be a miracle drive, it formats just about any floppy regardless how broken. 😀

I know there is software that can low-level format floppies but the such utility I have only works under XP and I do not have a working XP system in use at this moment in time.

Fluffing around with some old Linux distros. Couldn't get over how well SuSE 7.2 is put together compare to distros such as RH of similar "vintage" :

:

I've been overclocking the Core Duo T2600 I recently bought. Despite being very similar to Dothan, Yonah is a much better overclocker. I could only get Dothan (Pentium M) up to 2.72GHz. So far Yonah has been nice and stable at 3.06GHz on my i975 based AOpen Socket M board. And man, this baby just screams. Clock for clock, Yonah is right between K8 and Core 2 in most apps.

So no, AMD didn't have the best gaming CPUs back in late 05/early 06. Intel did--in the form of the mobile-only Core Duo!

I am in the process of restoring an Hewlet Packard DC-7600-SFF machine, and have pimped it a bit.
So far, 3ghz Socket 775, 2gb Ram and an Radeon-X550 PCI-E card.
It is running WindowsXP as a temporary solution, because it is easy as a platform for testing.
What it will be running in the end, I really do not know. Perhaps Win2K ?

Anyway... Today I mounted some fans, and because it is not possible to mount anything at
those places, I have improvised a bit. I have soldered new cables, butchering what I had allready.
I will find better solutions in the future. As for now, this will do plenty enough.

(tested my new phone, taking these pictures. Moto G3 is great at taking HW pictures 😜 )

Received the VIA C3 Nehemiah I ordered this morning and have been been messing with how slow I can make the CPU run and how far I can overclock it. Results here: Re: via c3 nehemiah motherboard compatability

Had to redo some benchmarks. FEAR results are lower with wireless keyboard / mouse. How bizarre...

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Had to redo some benchmarks. FEAR results are lower with wireless keyboard / mouse. How bizarre...

Wireless stuff suck's anyway. 😁 (Might just be me)

I used so I can operate the retro pc through the capture screen. It's a Logitech and the game is known to have issues with Logitech gear. Anyway I'm just glad I spotted it early enough...

I finished backing ~2TB over USB2, its retro because a large part of it is manuals, drivers and BIOS files and because of USB2*... I also backed up my complete dump of Wikipedia and a reader just in case.

*The EVGA SR-2 has USB3, my case has easily accessible USB3 jacks but they are of course not connected! 😁

Skyscraper wrote:

I finished backing ~2TB over USB2, its retro because a large part of it is manuals, drivers and BIOS files and because of USB2*... I also backed up my complete dump of Wikipedia and a reader just in case.

*The EVGA SR-2 has USB3, my case has easily accessible USB3 jacks but they are of course not connected! 😁

Yikes. That must've been over 20 hours to finish?

clueless1 wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I finished backing ~2TB over USB2, its retro because a large part of it is manuals, drivers and BIOS files and because of USB2*... I also backed up my complete dump of Wikipedia and a reader just in case.

*The EVGA SR-2 has USB3, my case has easily accessible USB3 jacks but they are of course not connected! 😁

Yikes. That must've been over 20 hours to finish?

That is a very good estimate, I diddnt keep track of the exact time but the transfer speed was ~27 MB/s , some quick math says it took about 20H 30m but it was only almost 2TB so 20 hours is probably right on the money.

I have yet to see a USB 2.0 device which can achieve more than 7MB/s. USB 3.0 seems to have improved this immensely.

I wouldn't want to be doing that, especially not if I had to keep selecting and copying manually or hanging around for confirmation prompts.

When I first got my Pentium D, my network was still on 10Base-2 BNC (With some newly installed 10Base-T RJ-45, but on hubs so half-duplex) and I had to run an older machine (Pentium II) to copy some of my old files over to the new machine from old drives. Think it was a couple of hundred Gigabytes I had to move, it used up an entire day and I think it is why some stuff never got backed up and eventually went missing... Yeah, I was a little slow on the uptake of Fast Ethernet. That network lasted until around 2007 with small bodges being made until the 386-16 server I was using gave up the ghost and I replaced the whole thing... Was kind of a sad day actually.

HighTreason wrote:

I have yet to see a USB 2.0 device which can achieve more than 7MB/s. USB 3.0 seems to have improved this immensely.

I wouldn't want to be doing that, especially not if I had to keep selecting and copying manually or hanging around for confirmation prompts.

When I first got my Pentium D, my network was still on 10Base-2 BNC (With some newly installed 10Base-T RJ-45, but on hubs so half-duplex) and I had to run an older machine (Pentium II) to copy some of my old files over to the new machine from old drives. Think it was a couple of hundred Gigabytes I had to move, it used up an entire day and I think it is why some stuff never got backed up and eventually went missing... Yeah, I was a little slow on the uptake of Fast Ethernet. That network lasted until around 2007 with small bodges being made until the 386-16 server I was using gave up the ghost and I replaced the whole thing... Was kind of a sad day actually.

I was positively surprised when it comes to the speed! The decent speed is probably because I use a rather new USB3 HDD and the USB2 implementation on the motherboard is an Intel one. I got two confirmation prompts but as I have a nasty cold I have nothing better to do anyhow, during my 4 hours of (non) sleep there were no hiccups.

Skyscraper wrote:

Im rescuing floppies which are so messed up that the floppy drives I usually use wont even format them.

The Samsung SFD-321B /KCP 1.44MB floppy drive I removed from my Compaq Presario K6-2 system turns out to be a miracle drive, it formats just about any floppy regardless how broken. 😀

I know there is software that can low-level format floppies but the such utility I have only works under XP and I do not have a working XP system in use at this moment in time.

What drives do you normally use? Floppy drive outliers like your Samsung often interest me, curious as to "why" it's a miracle drive. 😀

Stiletto wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Im rescuing floppies which are so messed up that the floppy drives I usually use wont even format them.

The Samsung SFD-321B /KCP 1.44MB floppy drive I removed from my Compaq Presario K6-2 system turns out to be a miracle drive, it formats just about any floppy regardless how broken. 😀

I know there is software that can low-level format floppies but the such utility I have only works under XP and I do not have a working XP system in use at this moment in time.

What drives do you normally use? Floppy drive outliers like your Samsung often interest me, curious as to "why" it's a miracle drive. 😀

The 5 drives in the pile on the test bench at the moment, all working reasonable well only not with floppies my worthless Sony USB floppy drive has trashed.

2x YE-Data YD-701B-6031B 1.44MB (these are really old)
1x Alps Electric 1.44MB made 98-14 (only have the HP P/N)
1x Mitsumi D359T5 1.44MB
1x Teac FD-235HS 1.44MB

The Samsung drive stays on the test bench though.

As I was going to use the camera anyhow.

The 4 models of floppy drives that arent as good as the Samsung one.

The Samsung drive.

One 3.5" floppy drive looks like all other floppy drives in existence, well almost.

This afternoon I've finally managed to connect one of my 486 on the LAN via TCP/IP, and directly from MS-DOS, so without passing by any Windows or GUI. The network card used, perfectly recognized by NDIS drivers and Microsoft Client Manager software, is 3Com EtherLink III ISA, mod. 3C509B-TPO.

Just fabulous!!!

Here is the same 486 while Telnetting my local-hosted BBS, through mTCP MS-DOS software *______*

Awesome, Indrid Cold! Love your BBS 😀

Once you get your head around using a packet driver the mTCP suite of programs does a fab. job.Clients I use for plain Windows 3.1 is WSIRC, WfW 3.11, OS/2 PMirc and linux mainly xChat but do use ircii from time to time. Of course there are Windows options such as HexChat but my wife and I don't use that as much nowadays. There's also your Tablet of choice.

Below is a pic of Turbo Linux 6.0 with xchat flogged from RedHat 6.2, quite easy to do btw and opens up more software, while testing out yet another BigFoot drive on my testbed P200mmx box. They're not as slow has low as folk would have you make and are ideal for older systems. Generally Linux a installation takes 15-20mins on this class of system, 128 megs of ram, if done right 😊

I've always found 3Com cards to be remarkably quick and easy to set up and operate, but in particular the 3C-509 series and 3C-905 series are the best.

Im watching retro related videos on Youtube as my nose has been running constantly for 36+ hours. I do not get sick often, only once every other year or so but when I get a cold it always seems to be the worst kind which dosnt even allow me to sleep.