Bargain LTSpice/Lab laptop

Jan 24, 2022 Last reply: 4 years ago 27 Replies

The 386 portable has no internal slots. I *do* have the expansion chassis (a large "bag" that bolts on the back) -- but it only supports two slots and I have a double-wide card that usually sits in there.

A better move is a PATA-SATA adapter (I think I have some of those... or, maybe they are SCA-SCSI or FW or... <shrug>)

But, you're still stuck with the limitations of the old BIOS -- which had no "user defined" disk geometry (and dates from the days when the PC told the drive what it's geometry would be). To support the

600M drive, I had to edit the BIOS EPROMs (yes, that's how old it is!) and fix the checksum so my changes didn't signal a POST fault. [Or, maybe it was 340M like the "spare" I have? I can't recall. Booting it to check would be tedious as the BBRAM is failed (used a large battery for that, back then, made in Israel, IIRC). And, "setup" resides on a 5" floppy just to get in and set the parameters... Yes, only of value to collectors! But, a small footprint way for me to support a pair of ISA slots!]

That's how the numbers in that report look to me.

The raw read-error rate is very low, and hasn't ever been anything other than very low.

The drive has never been unable to read data from one of its sectors. It has never felt a need to declare a sector "bad" (e.g. required too many read retries), and move its data to a spare sector. There are no sectors which are "pending" that sort of reallocation. Hardware-level error-correction-code data recoveries (e.g. low-level bit errors during read, fully corrected by the ECC) seem quite reasonable.

It seems to be spinning up reliably when power comes on.

It does appear to have gotten hot than it wanted to be, at some point (the on-a-scale-of-100 "airflow temperature" value was below threshold). Might want to check the fans and filters and make sure there's enough air flowing past the drive.

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