my got-damn JPEGifer is broken again. why am I uploading big PNGs?

okay I had to take an hour long break to fix pastejpeg.

Here's the insides!

CPU!
It's a A80502-100 SX963: A 100mhz Pentium 1, bus speed of 50 or 66 mhz.

This is post-FDIV fix. Boooo.

fan and heatsink are very messy. very, very messy.

Okay, fan and heatsink cleaned up. Fan tested, and reattached.

bah. my battery box has gone missing. I can't find my CR2032s

I pulled out the Rustmaster 9000 PSU. This is not getting tested, it's going directly back into the swamp from whence it came

Darn. My clean PSU isn't gonna fit into this case, the fan + power plugs are at the wrong location. I'll have to pull another one from my Car Fulla AT Towers.

But in the meantime, lemme just grab a modern PSU and my ATX2AT

Putting a modern gamer-black PSU in a classic AT tower is just wrong.

Hmm. Nothing from the motherboard: It doesn't ever init the VGA. I'm gonna need to find my POST card. Hoping it's just one of those units that won't power on without a CMOS battery

ooh cool, I was able to get the picante CR2032s!

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

okay I pulled the cards.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

hooking up a mastodon bot to post whenever it updates

currently at 7036k

@hennichodernich found an advert for (almost) this exact model!

https://radiosocial.de/@hennichodernich/112050921975858783

I paused it to implement some tmux nonsense so I could actually make this bot if I want to, which made it slow down.

So now it's estimating it'll be done August 15...

2028

it has somehow sped up to the point where it thinks it'll finish within the next 2 hours, despite having only copied 2.48% (51mb) of the drive. It's getting an average read rate of 510 bytes a second

I wonder if I could adjust the IDE timeout without having to recompile my kernel

I made a program to scrape the status from ddrescue, just in time for it to error out and drop the drive from the bus:

Copied 52400 kB of 2048 mB (2.48%) at an average rate of 501 B/s. ETA: 1h 27m

I was able to do the trick I did before where I repeatedly reset the SCSI host device until it is recognized.

the problem is that it keeps falling right back off the bus when I try to run ddrescue

sdb: detected capacity change from 2111864832 to 0

awww, my bytes are gone

oops. I accidentally hotplugged the hard drive

I dunno why this drive isn't working

ok I'm officially giving up on this drive.

I was able, in the end, to capture about 54mb of the drive. 2.48%

I was able to get info and find out that this machine hosted this website at some point in 2005:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040325064945/http://www.windowsacademy.net/