You have to wonder about designers
Jun. 25th, 2014 02:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrA few months back, I picked up a new-to-me box that will eventually become my main system.
It's a Gateway E-4300. Had a DVD rive and a CD drive. No hard drives and 512 meg of RAM. 3.4 GHZ CPU.
It's expandable to 4 gig, which will do me fine since XP can't handle more than that, and if I set up dual boot with Linux, it should be fairly happy with it.
Anyway, in the process of slow upgrades around here, I'd discovered that the two 2 TB drives that I thought had problems were fine. Plus I'd picked up so old "small" drives from Doug to upgrade stuff.
A pair of 129 gig IDE drives, to replace the 40 gig drives the pair of IBM ThinkCentre boxes I'd gotten from him a while back. They were part of a batch he got cheap and he didn't need those two. One is serving as a media server of sorts until I can afford a blu-ray player that can play stuff off the network.
I wanted to replace the drives on those because they'd been "fresh" base installs, and if I swap them out, I can put them away to have a way to restore thodse systems to something resembling "factory" software config.
Got one done (I think I posted about that).
The second has to wait until I get done with the current shuffle.
I also got some SATA drives from Doug (and wil be paying him for those and other things for months). A 250 gig and a pair of 320s.
I initially tried putting one of the 320s in the 4300, and installing linux. It didn't like the install DVD. The install failed partway thru.
After several tries, I gave up. I'm ouit of DVD blanks currently, so burning a new one wasn't an option.
So I dug out an XP CD and used the XP Pro license on the case to "reinstall" it. That took a while, but worked.
Then I stuck in a mobile rack from my old main system that's been unusable for a couple of years (it's either the motherboard or the CPU and not worth the trouble of figuring out which). I also stuck in the other 320 gig SATA drive. I was able to take the "backup" of the old system's main drive (on a 320 gig IDE drive). Got the system to regonize all three drives.
I installed Partition Magic and Drive Image. I used Drive Image's "copy drive to drive" mode to transfer the IDE drive to the SATA drive. I was to regret this. Doing that on an XP box with only 512 meg of RAM was *painfully. It took a lot of hours. Less than a day, but I think it took more than 12 hours. It's only taken half an hour or so to transfer the 40 gig HD in the one Thinkcente to the 120 gig IDE.
But at last it was done. I shut it down, swapped in the 250 gig IDE drive that was the *actual* main drive from the dead box, and ran various file comparison utils (Beyond Compare etc) to make sure that the backup still had everything I needed. The backup had been in another box where I'd been salvaging various data files, especial from my huge collection of images, video and music. Aftrer hours of work, I'd confirmed that the onlt stuff missing were various files I'd moved to other systems .
So I could "archive" the 250 gig drive for now. Alas, I'm not sure I can reimnstall a few of the programs as they are from websites that don't exist anymore. But I'll keep my fingers crossed.
I also discovered during this that the system will boot from an IDE drive in the mobile rack in preference to the internal SATA drive. Fortunately if you hit the right key at boot, you can bypass this. It'll come in handy for running other OSes or configs though.
Now we come to the part that sparked the subject of this post...
Remember those two questionable 2 TB SATA drives? One was a backup of the 2 TB drive attached to the media box. I got a new external encolsuire (with eSATA) to hook it back up. I've only just finished getting it back in synch with the media server drive. So I now have all that stuff reliably backed up again.
That final 2 TB drive had gotten glitched when I was running it via USB attached to the secondary system that had replaced the dead main system.
It'd appeared hopeless (Windows reported no free space and wouldn't do anything else with it), but when plugged into the media box using the new enclosure (and eSATA rather than USB) Windows did a chkdsk on it at boot and "fixed" things. A few garbled files so far but nothing serious)
Anyway, I wanted to stick it in the Gateway E-4300.
I have to describe the drive bays on this box. Working from the top down, we have a pair of externally accessible 5.25" bays. One has a DVD drive in it, the other originally had a CD, but I replaced it with the mobile rack.
Below this, are a pair of 3.5" bays, also externally accessible. The lower one has a floppy drive in it.
Now all of these were (of course) "front facing".
Below those are another two internal only 3.5" bays. They are side facing. The side of the drive ois twords the front panel of the computer and the power and datsa connections are facing you when you have the system open.
I'd put the pair of 320 gig SATA drives in these.
Now the weirdness starts. The motherboard has 4 SATA connectors. But when I examined the power cables, there are only *three* SATA power connectors. Even dumber, if you plug the last two connectors on that cable into the two drives in the internal bays, the third connector comes up an inch short of being able to connect to a SATA drive in the lowest of the "external" 3.5" bays.
What the hell?
I managed to get it to work by installing the 2 TB drive upside down so that the connector was closer to the case opening. There was *just* enough slack to twist the connector upside down.
What sort of designer supplies only 3 power connectors for a computer that can support 4 drives *and* has them on the same cable and too close together???
Another design oddity is that there's a re sort of squarish plastic "funnel" attached to the CPU fan. There's a grating oin the case pabel that goes over it. Seems like a reasonable idea, yes? Except there's about an inch *gap* between the top of the funnel and the case.
Oh yes, I'd upgrade from the secondary box I'd been using (an old Gateway E-4600) to an HP d530. It's faster, and had bigger hard drives. It also maxes out at 4 gig of RAM (has 3.5 currently). Its oddity is that when I tried sticking a mobile rack in it (to replace a CD drive) it wouldn't recognize the HD. My best guess after swapping various things is that even though the mother board has a pair of IDE connectors, each of which will support a pair of IDE devices, apparently the BIOS won't allow more than 2 HDs.
Again, WTF?
The one test I haven't run is disconnecting one of the pair of 160 gig drives and seeing if the system will then recognize an HD in the mobile rack. If *that* doesn't work, I'll reconnect the second 160 gig drive and see what happens if I swap the cables at the motherboard end (if it turns out that they've somehow got things set up so that one motherboard connector supports HDs and the other only supports removable devices (optical drives and the like) I'll be even more disgusted ythat the design.
Either way it's really *odd* design "feature"
The ThinkCentres are a bit odd, but not in a bad way. They are *extremely* compact systems. One IDe connector on the motherboard and 2 SATA connectors. And the drive bays sort of fold over the motherboard. When I did the drive upgrade on the one, I was switching from a 40 gig SATA to a 120 gig IDE. running cables to get both drivres attached at the same time was tricky, but doable.
The fun was getting it to boot off the IDE drive after things were copied. The BIOS hand a far more extensive boot device list than I was used to. The wrinkle I hadn't noticed was that in addition to the list of *8* devices you could set the boot priority of, it had 8 more slots for devices it wasn't allowed to boot from. And the 120 gig drive was on the second list. A few keystroke, and I'd enabled the 120 gig as a boot device, and moved it to the proper place in the boot list
Oh yeah, those two unused SATA conector? I got an adapter that turns them into a pair of eSATA connectors on the back of the system. That's how the pair of 2 TB external drives are attached to the media box. And it's how I attach Fay's 2 TB drive (which we'd also thought was in bad shape) to the other ThinkCentree when she comes over. While we watch TV and stuff I can copy stuff two and from it.
In July I'm planning to hit Fee Geek for RAM for the E-4300. I should be able to afford at least a gig of RAM hopefully 2 gigs. And if I'm lucky, the full 4. At which point that box becomes my main box, though it'll be running side buy side with the current box for a while as I get programs installed etc.
Currently I'm using it as a networked drive so I can go thru the stuff on that third 2 TB drive. I discovered that at some point I'd backed up a big chunk of the files from the media server to it. I'm slowly going thru and removing those (I've freed a third of a terabyte so far).
Still got more shuffling to do. And I need a third external enclosure so I can get that 2 TB drive out of the E-4300. Need a 4th 2 TB drive and enclosure so I can back it up. But for now, I'll use it to back up other drives that aren't backed up as well as I like.
Even longer ranged will be an NAS box, but given my finances that's a year or two off.
Nearer term is getting a gigabit ethernet switch. A 5 port is pretty cheap, but I'd have all the ports in use immediately. On the other hand, it'd hold things for a while and I can use it for the other room when I can afford an 8 or 16 port box. /I realized I need to start looking at this *soon* when I realized that the HP, the Gateway, and the two ThinkCentres *all* have ggigabit ethernet, and given the amount of data I'm shuffling back and forth, it'd probably improve performance a lot.
Far in the future would be a gigabit capable router. Not because my broadband wil ever be up to it, but because I'll have at leasytt two different clusters of boxes connected to it, and it'd be a bottleneck (though moving the 5 port gigabit switch next to the router when I can upgrad to something larger would let me run the clusters thru it, and just plug the router into one of the ports on it.
It's a Gateway E-4300. Had a DVD rive and a CD drive. No hard drives and 512 meg of RAM. 3.4 GHZ CPU.
It's expandable to 4 gig, which will do me fine since XP can't handle more than that, and if I set up dual boot with Linux, it should be fairly happy with it.
Anyway, in the process of slow upgrades around here, I'd discovered that the two 2 TB drives that I thought had problems were fine. Plus I'd picked up so old "small" drives from Doug to upgrade stuff.
A pair of 129 gig IDE drives, to replace the 40 gig drives the pair of IBM ThinkCentre boxes I'd gotten from him a while back. They were part of a batch he got cheap and he didn't need those two. One is serving as a media server of sorts until I can afford a blu-ray player that can play stuff off the network.
I wanted to replace the drives on those because they'd been "fresh" base installs, and if I swap them out, I can put them away to have a way to restore thodse systems to something resembling "factory" software config.
Got one done (I think I posted about that).
The second has to wait until I get done with the current shuffle.
I also got some SATA drives from Doug (and wil be paying him for those and other things for months). A 250 gig and a pair of 320s.
I initially tried putting one of the 320s in the 4300, and installing linux. It didn't like the install DVD. The install failed partway thru.
After several tries, I gave up. I'm ouit of DVD blanks currently, so burning a new one wasn't an option.
So I dug out an XP CD and used the XP Pro license on the case to "reinstall" it. That took a while, but worked.
Then I stuck in a mobile rack from my old main system that's been unusable for a couple of years (it's either the motherboard or the CPU and not worth the trouble of figuring out which). I also stuck in the other 320 gig SATA drive. I was able to take the "backup" of the old system's main drive (on a 320 gig IDE drive). Got the system to regonize all three drives.
I installed Partition Magic and Drive Image. I used Drive Image's "copy drive to drive" mode to transfer the IDE drive to the SATA drive. I was to regret this. Doing that on an XP box with only 512 meg of RAM was *painfully. It took a lot of hours. Less than a day, but I think it took more than 12 hours. It's only taken half an hour or so to transfer the 40 gig HD in the one Thinkcente to the 120 gig IDE.
But at last it was done. I shut it down, swapped in the 250 gig IDE drive that was the *actual* main drive from the dead box, and ran various file comparison utils (Beyond Compare etc) to make sure that the backup still had everything I needed. The backup had been in another box where I'd been salvaging various data files, especial from my huge collection of images, video and music. Aftrer hours of work, I'd confirmed that the onlt stuff missing were various files I'd moved to other systems .
So I could "archive" the 250 gig drive for now. Alas, I'm not sure I can reimnstall a few of the programs as they are from websites that don't exist anymore. But I'll keep my fingers crossed.
I also discovered during this that the system will boot from an IDE drive in the mobile rack in preference to the internal SATA drive. Fortunately if you hit the right key at boot, you can bypass this. It'll come in handy for running other OSes or configs though.
Now we come to the part that sparked the subject of this post...
Remember those two questionable 2 TB SATA drives? One was a backup of the 2 TB drive attached to the media box. I got a new external encolsuire (with eSATA) to hook it back up. I've only just finished getting it back in synch with the media server drive. So I now have all that stuff reliably backed up again.
That final 2 TB drive had gotten glitched when I was running it via USB attached to the secondary system that had replaced the dead main system.
It'd appeared hopeless (Windows reported no free space and wouldn't do anything else with it), but when plugged into the media box using the new enclosure (and eSATA rather than USB) Windows did a chkdsk on it at boot and "fixed" things. A few garbled files so far but nothing serious)
Anyway, I wanted to stick it in the Gateway E-4300.
I have to describe the drive bays on this box. Working from the top down, we have a pair of externally accessible 5.25" bays. One has a DVD drive in it, the other originally had a CD, but I replaced it with the mobile rack.
Below this, are a pair of 3.5" bays, also externally accessible. The lower one has a floppy drive in it.
Now all of these were (of course) "front facing".
Below those are another two internal only 3.5" bays. They are side facing. The side of the drive ois twords the front panel of the computer and the power and datsa connections are facing you when you have the system open.
I'd put the pair of 320 gig SATA drives in these.
Now the weirdness starts. The motherboard has 4 SATA connectors. But when I examined the power cables, there are only *three* SATA power connectors. Even dumber, if you plug the last two connectors on that cable into the two drives in the internal bays, the third connector comes up an inch short of being able to connect to a SATA drive in the lowest of the "external" 3.5" bays.
What the hell?
I managed to get it to work by installing the 2 TB drive upside down so that the connector was closer to the case opening. There was *just* enough slack to twist the connector upside down.
What sort of designer supplies only 3 power connectors for a computer that can support 4 drives *and* has them on the same cable and too close together???
Another design oddity is that there's a re sort of squarish plastic "funnel" attached to the CPU fan. There's a grating oin the case pabel that goes over it. Seems like a reasonable idea, yes? Except there's about an inch *gap* between the top of the funnel and the case.
Oh yes, I'd upgrade from the secondary box I'd been using (an old Gateway E-4600) to an HP d530. It's faster, and had bigger hard drives. It also maxes out at 4 gig of RAM (has 3.5 currently). Its oddity is that when I tried sticking a mobile rack in it (to replace a CD drive) it wouldn't recognize the HD. My best guess after swapping various things is that even though the mother board has a pair of IDE connectors, each of which will support a pair of IDE devices, apparently the BIOS won't allow more than 2 HDs.
Again, WTF?
The one test I haven't run is disconnecting one of the pair of 160 gig drives and seeing if the system will then recognize an HD in the mobile rack. If *that* doesn't work, I'll reconnect the second 160 gig drive and see what happens if I swap the cables at the motherboard end (if it turns out that they've somehow got things set up so that one motherboard connector supports HDs and the other only supports removable devices (optical drives and the like) I'll be even more disgusted ythat the design.
Either way it's really *odd* design "feature"
The ThinkCentres are a bit odd, but not in a bad way. They are *extremely* compact systems. One IDe connector on the motherboard and 2 SATA connectors. And the drive bays sort of fold over the motherboard. When I did the drive upgrade on the one, I was switching from a 40 gig SATA to a 120 gig IDE. running cables to get both drivres attached at the same time was tricky, but doable.
The fun was getting it to boot off the IDE drive after things were copied. The BIOS hand a far more extensive boot device list than I was used to. The wrinkle I hadn't noticed was that in addition to the list of *8* devices you could set the boot priority of, it had 8 more slots for devices it wasn't allowed to boot from. And the 120 gig drive was on the second list. A few keystroke, and I'd enabled the 120 gig as a boot device, and moved it to the proper place in the boot list
Oh yeah, those two unused SATA conector? I got an adapter that turns them into a pair of eSATA connectors on the back of the system. That's how the pair of 2 TB external drives are attached to the media box. And it's how I attach Fay's 2 TB drive (which we'd also thought was in bad shape) to the other ThinkCentree when she comes over. While we watch TV and stuff I can copy stuff two and from it.
In July I'm planning to hit Fee Geek for RAM for the E-4300. I should be able to afford at least a gig of RAM hopefully 2 gigs. And if I'm lucky, the full 4. At which point that box becomes my main box, though it'll be running side buy side with the current box for a while as I get programs installed etc.
Currently I'm using it as a networked drive so I can go thru the stuff on that third 2 TB drive. I discovered that at some point I'd backed up a big chunk of the files from the media server to it. I'm slowly going thru and removing those (I've freed a third of a terabyte so far).
Still got more shuffling to do. And I need a third external enclosure so I can get that 2 TB drive out of the E-4300. Need a 4th 2 TB drive and enclosure so I can back it up. But for now, I'll use it to back up other drives that aren't backed up as well as I like.
Even longer ranged will be an NAS box, but given my finances that's a year or two off.
Nearer term is getting a gigabit ethernet switch. A 5 port is pretty cheap, but I'd have all the ports in use immediately. On the other hand, it'd hold things for a while and I can use it for the other room when I can afford an 8 or 16 port box. /I realized I need to start looking at this *soon* when I realized that the HP, the Gateway, and the two ThinkCentres *all* have ggigabit ethernet, and given the amount of data I'm shuffling back and forth, it'd probably improve performance a lot.
Far in the future would be a gigabit capable router. Not because my broadband wil ever be up to it, but because I'll have at leasytt two different clusters of boxes connected to it, and it'd be a bottleneck (though moving the 5 port gigabit switch next to the router when I can upgrad to something larger would let me run the clusters thru it, and just plug the router into one of the ports on it.
