Nicolet 660

Today we tried a bit more work on the Nicolet in the hopes of seeing what is wrong with the hard drive. Having opened it up, the hard drive is labeled as a Priam 803-21 8" SMD drive. We ran the disk checking utility, SMDBUSTER, but got a SMD timeout when we tried to select the drive (see http://csplan9.rit.edu/users/john/nicolet/IMG_1633.jpg). The hard drive does spin up; we can feel it spinning by touching the enclosure. The bootup screen seems to indicate that at least some models supported booting from a Winchester drive, but since this unit never had a Winchester installed it may lack the hardware to handle it. If anyone has a Priam 803-21 lying around, maybe you can help us: there did not seem to be any status lights on it, but we couldn't see the whole thing without removing all the screws and cables (which we didn't do at that time). From the prices I'm seeing online, these drives must have solid gold platters and diamond bearings, so unless somebody has one sitting around unused to go really cheap, I don't know that buying a replacement drive is really an option. We took some pictures too, you can find them at http://csplan9.rit.edu/magic/webls?dir=/users/john/nicolet http://csplan9.rit.edu/users/john/nicolet/IMG_1640.jpg is a shot of the front. WARNING! Large files (several megs each)! I didn't resize them because I didn't feel like spending all the time especially since I don't have to pay for the bandwidth on that server... John -- "I've tried programming Ruby on Rails, following TechCrunch in my RSS reader, and drinking absinthe. It doesn't work. I'm going back to C, Hunter S. Thompson, and cheap whiskey." -- Ted Dziuba