1 Jun
1999
1 Jun
'99
2:33 p.m.
It would be a
hassle to reassemble a machine just to check the drives to
make sure that they were all erased properly. So, should I give the ones
that I no longer want to somebody who acknowledges intellectual property
rights and would HELP if I screwed up and made a mistake; or should I let
somebody have them who feels that whatever is on them is now theirs, and
would RUN a self-extracting archive?
Your point is well taken as to whom might be suitable
recipients, but in
reality, it shouldn't take but 20 minutes to cobble together a
motherboard with minimal memory, video, and an MFM HDC to do a low level
format on each of them. That would rather eliminate the agonizing. For
my part, I'd take the ST-412s and 225s before I'd look at the 4096s,
though.
You're right that it SHOULDN'T take but 20 minutes. But it does. I go to
erase a 100M 3.5" ESDI drive, but where's an ESDI controller? There're
half a dozen composting somewhere here. Stick it back on the shelf, and
somebody wanting it will just have to wait until someday when I get around
to it. OR hand it off to somebody who I would TRUST to do the erasing for
me when they install the drive in their own machine. I DID cobble
together a temporary machine to erase the 4096s, and did half a dozen of
them. But that was a while back, and I stupidly didn't do a good job of
labelling them. And it looks like they've been rearranged, and more added
to the pile. So, I'd better do it again. I try to erase a 4096, but the
power supply on that machine just can't handle such a power hog. WOW! How
much power do those draw?!? So, I change power supply. Now there's enough
power, but 5 of the 4096s don't respond. Should I repair a drive that I'm
getting rid of? I don't have the level of expertise to do it right, so I
could try swapping circuit boards with one of the working ones, etc. Or
should I give the drive to somebody who DOES have the skill and/or a
better supply of parts to swap, who might be able to get it working? I
have to choose between destroying it (which I can't bear to do), spending
time and effort repairing something that I don't want, or giving it to
somebody trustworthy.
A friend wants a few drives. If I DO screw up and leave something behind,
I can count on him being part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Yes, it SHOULDN'T take but 20 minutes. But neither should washing the
dishes, cleaning the leaves out of the gutters, or maybe even cleaning up
part of my office. I'll get around to it. Sure, I will.
In the meantime, a friend just gave me a Northstar Horizon! It has a Z80A
board, a memory card with 64K of RAM, and disk controller. Now I need to
look through my diskettes to see if I have a Northstar system disk. My
hard-sectored floppies USED TO be separate, until a new assistant
rearranged them all into alphabetical order by who the disks came from!
(He didn't last long) And I need to bring up a terminal, or configure
something to function as a terminal.
Lots of things that I SHOULD get around to doing, but they can wait. And
people who want drives, whom I can't trust to HELP in the event of a
mistake on my part, are the lowest priority of all.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com