40Gb Western Digital hard drive

I try to avoid computahs whenever possible. However, they do pay for my decadent and lavish lifestyle, so they're difficult to avoid.

The local senior citizens group runs a recycling operation.

The computer part was profitable when China was buying everything. These days, it's borderline. There also was a recycling operation at the local dump, but that went away about 3 years ago: (kinda old) The problem is that I can't return anything for credit or refund. I have to make an astute guess as to whether I can fix it, how much it will cost to fix, who I could sell it to, and whether I can make a profit on the repair. It's speculation at it's worst. My guess is that I lose money on all the computer rebuilds, but do fairly well on the HP printers and plotters.

MHDD is a good program for testing hard disks. That's one that I use when I get a pile of drives to test. I use the "magic-boot" version. The only catch is that I once wiped a drive by accident. Be careful with live data.

Locally, the monthly price of a DSL account is only slightly more than a dialup. When I had the only DSL in the neighborhood, most of the neighbors were "borrowing" my bandwidth (with my permission). You might ask around to see who's got a cable modem (faster than DSL) that's willing to share.

The hard part was trying to remember the strange names of the various distributions. 8.04 was Hardy Heron, a truly memorable name that I can recall for about 10 minutes.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

They were made by the company that started eMachines. I haven't seen many newer HPs. (Not ones worth fixing) They similar designs were more common between 2000-2005. I've seen more bad power supplies in HP computers than any other brand I've worked on. When I get time, I will log the brands and models in the 20 or so banana boxes of bad power supplies I've pulled from computers over the last few years.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Hi!

Their 230/250 watt PC power supply has no overvoltage protection circuit. If something goes wrong, the motherboard usually gets it. I've found that nearly everything else (optical drive, hard disk, etc) survives.

The later 300/350 watt supplies are better and do appear to have an OVP circuit.

I think the often-highly-questionable wiring that some people have in their homes only serves to accelerate the demise of these supplies. Some of the wiring messes I have come across while servicing computers are dangerous. I'm not an electrician, so I can't fix it for someone else, but I do strongly suggest that they have it fixed ASAP.

Out of the ones I have, some of which run 24/7, I have never lost one.

As to your hard drive, perhaps they had a virus that was resident in the MBR or a similarly difficult-to-eradicate location? Or perhaps it really has been damaged and is not reliable.

William

Sometimes you get lucky and can fix an infected drive with the command 'fdisk /mbr'. You have to boot with an emergency startup or diagnostics disk with a copy of fdisk. You can run the command manually, or run it from an autoexec.bat or other .bat file.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Huh, they're still in business? That's a surprise...

Good point, a lot of people don't know they need electrical work until after a problem has already cost them money.

Hmm, I hadn't thought to do a virus scan on it, if that's what it was I hope it's gone. Thanks, Mike

You say a small HP, was it the kind that allows only one hard drive and one CD inside (no room for anything more )? If so, it sounds like a re-badged EVO - seems like a lot of 'modern' mfgs. just change the name of their crap these days, rather than fix the problem...

What with the cost and low capacity of the correct replacement gel cell battery/-ies for most UPS's, I found it works pretty good on the higher capacity ones to make a hole in the side of the UPS and extend the battery cables out to some wet cell deep cycle batteries (the 3 UPS's I've got all use 2 12v ones in series). Since the ones I'm using now aren't industrial quality, I make sure the batteries are fully charged before initially hooking them up. You need to make sure there's good ventilation as a hydrogen gas build up could become a BIG problem.

What is the difference between a server and a 'normal computer anyway? I've got a Compaq Proliant DL 380 rack-mounted server (no rack to mount it in though) I've been hoping to figure out how to use it like a PC, just out of curiosity as much as anything else.

No, HP construction is obvious. Their part numbers are stamped into everything.

The battery cables would have to be 20' long to put car batteries in a safe location.

A server is designed to run 24/7, and should have at least two power supplies. They generally have three or more hard drives for a small RAID array. They are better built than a consumer grade computer. You can use them as a regular computer, but it my not have a high resolution video card. A consumer type OS may not support multiple processors.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Huh, I had a feeling there was a reason I wouldn't be able to do anything with it when I bought it. Thanks for thew info.

Doesn't it have at least one empty slot where you can install a better video card? You can use multiple drives without installing a RAID driver. Don't pitch it out, if it works. Play with it. Install a version of Linux or use it for a test bed computer. You can remove the rack mount brackets on a lot of server cases and use them as a big desktop computer, or you can use some scrap lumber an made a crude rack for it. Hand it under your computer desk if it is a one or two unit size. Be creative. If all else fails, sell it on Ebay or Craigslist. :)

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Damn, that can be time consuming, for sure. I'd like to compare notes on using mhdd, but I didn't take any notes, so probably would get a bunch of stuff wrong if I tried to recollect correctly; plus, I discovered issues with the test machine's that I used, the 1st one I think is a MB problem and the 2nd one a cdrom that was causing the MB to misbehave. However, after getting familar with the program, I do feel that it does a pretty good job of pointing out a hopeless drive.

On a slightly different subject, when I got curious about the definition of 'low-level format', I did some googling on the subject and checked out the Wikipedia for a bit and now I don't know whether I even did any low-level formatting in the last few days, though I do know that I used to in the early 80's - oh, well I guess that's "progress' for ya.

Anyway, of the 3 hard drives that had been trashed by E-machines PSU failures, the WD 40Gb one is still working fine ( it's in the machine I'm posting from) so, after scanning it once and not seeing anything suspect I figure I'll just keep using it unless it starts acting up. Theres' also a 40 Gb Seagate that used not to be able to pass any of the mfg's utilities which, after running a few of the operations in mhdd now passes muster with the mfg's utilities, so I loaded ubuntu onto it and will start using it sos I can see whether or not it's a lasting fix. There's also an 80Gb Seagate drive which was not even addressable by any means, and mhdd was not able to address it either so I guess it must be totally screwed, forever, no matter what, it's still just an inert lump...had hopes of making it ert, but so it goes sometimes...:)

Thanks for the help, Mike

Oh, no, I'd never pitch anything out, (unless maybe I tripped over it and broke a toe or somethin')

I guess that the main obstacle is I don't know anything about scsi; there are no drives in the drive bay, and there's a scsi bus but I don't know jack about scsi. I've got a 2.1 Gb scsi drive, and some kind of scsi controller card, but just haven't spent much time looking into it yet.

Thanks, Mike

We'll, I wouldn't mind, but there's a problem. I don't keep any obviously defective drives and only save the paperwork on the good drives. The ones in between are kinda arbitrary. I'll keep results on the newer and better drives, but not on the older marginal junk. It's really not that much of a time burner. I have several test machines and boards, and usually let them run overnight.

My rule-of-thumb is that if the diagnostic says it's bad, it's almost certainly bad. If the diagnostic says it's good, it might be, but might also be bad due to some reason that wasn't obvious or tested. I once tested a drive (with a different program) that had obvious bearing spin (very noisy), but tested good.

Low level format is usually done by the factory, and never again. It's places the sector numbers and servo tracks on the platter. There are programs that plug into the diagnstic port of the drive that will recreate the sector numbers, bios preload area, diagnostic tracks, and landing zone allocation, but not the servo tracks. If the drive seems to require a new primary format, give up now.

Hint: I have a 15 year old Conner CP1060S 1GB drive sitting in my SCO Unix 3.2v4.2 server. It's been running continuously since about

1995(?). Three mother boards (486DX2/66), one video card, and one Wangtek tape controller card have blown up during this time. The secret to long HD life is leave it running all the time and protect it from power and static electricity glitches. I have other servers that have done almost as well, but this one is my oldest.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

ditto for heat.

I've had setups where I've had drives run hot; however I know they can't be expected to last 4 years under such conditions and that they not for storing anything of value. For example, I have 3 WD raptors in a raid-0 configuration burning away at 50-55 degC in my desktop. I don't give a shit because all they have on them is the OS, applications, and temporary video work files. Anything of value is on a seperate file server which is designed for the task and runs very cool with both onsite and offsite backups.

Then stick an IDE or SATA controller card in there. They don't have to run SCSI drives. You may have to change some settings in the BIOS, but that isn't difficult.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Or Just throw a scsi drive in there and play around with it. They're not that complicated. Don't run away from something just because you don't know how it works. Use it as an opportunity to broden your knowledge.

Mike

He didn't say what type of SCSI drive he needed. He may be missing the trays to hold a SCSI drive, as well. I was just offering a way to get it running, if everything else was good. The used Dell Power Edge

4350 I picked up for free last week works, and had three 36 G hard drives and a gig of RAM. The OS had been wiped, but I plan on using it as an Apache and Leafnode server. I installed Win 2000 to test the hardware, but I won't be using that OS.

--
Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

Good point. I forgot that servers have those trays to hold the hdd's.. I've been out of the PC game going on 2 years now. I really miss working on anything. Time for a job change. My passion is building and repairing things. When I finally get back to Florida maybe I can.

Excellent idea, guess I was suffering from some mental blockage; it would just take some creative cable routing to get to the drive bays. I was just looking at it and now recall that I'd figured the memory in it justified the cost of it even if it didn't run, but it does start up and I've looked around in the bios a little bit. However, it only has one processor installed, which is a PIII-S SL5PU. Kind a doubt that it's available any more, guess I'll have to check the docs and see what kind of processors will work in it.

The scsi I have has a different connector than the ones in the drive bay. It has a cdrom (it's kind of odd, looks like a laptop cd-drive) that has a connector that's the same as well as a back-plane connector that would fit it,

Thanks for the suggestions, I guess I was in need of a push to get around to doing something with it.

Another Mike