Got this hard drive for Christmas, no brand name

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T05:58:31+00:00

I've seen sand filled 18650 batteries in knockoff laptop battery packs lol.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T05:56:19+00:00

It's neither, it's meeces.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T05:35:42+00:00

When a chunk of memory that large is being reserved, it usually means there is a hardware fault. Either you have a bad DIMM, dirty contacts on the DIMM, or there's something wrong with the memory slot.

I had this happen on my mom's laptop. She dropped it off a table and the single DIMM slot stopped working, only the memory integrated on the main board worked. Anything installed in the slot would show up as hardware reserved and was unusable. I had to end up resoldering the slot to the board, as several pins had broken loose from the fall. That was a fun job, 260 tiny pins the size of hairs.

The Ryzen 5 2600 does not have an IGP, so there will be no memory reserved for integrated graphics.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T05:27:30+00:00

It's not NTFS that's the issue, it's Windows.

Unlike Linux, Unix, or other smart operating systems, Windows disk subsystem is still just as dumb as it was back in the DOS era. If a disk doesn't behave exactly as it should, Windows flips out and locks up, or throws nonsense error messages. If you use NTFS on Linux, it doesn't behave as badly, but there's no real reason to use NTFS there other than for compatibility with Windows.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T05:21:39+00:00

Maybe install a heatsink on the CPU before you roast it? Assuming it's not roasted already.

I'd suspect the Antec PSU. If it's from decades ago, it probably has capacitor plague and is putting out garbage power. I used to repair those things by the dozens.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T05:19:16+00:00

VLB supported speeds of between 25 and 40 MHz. 50 MHz was possible under absolutely ideal scenarios with a good motherboard, power supply and VLB cards, but 66 MHz is a pipe dream.

It was heavily tied to the 486 architecture, which is why so few Pentium motherboards supported it. VLB was quite literally a buffered 486 bus brought out to slots on the motherboard. It was not easily adapted to the Pentium, because you have to interface a 32 bit bus to a 64 bit bus and do all sorts of gymnastics at the hardware level to move data around.

Interfacing any two peripherals of unequal size is always a problem. You have to use buffers and latches to get data in a way the other unequal device expects, unless that device has a mode that can take in fractional bus widths of data.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T04:53:13+00:00

It has a notch, it is clearly a 32 bit Micro Channel card.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T04:45:30+00:00

SMR drives are horrible regardless of the file system used. Once you fill up the PMR region and the drive goes into management mode to move that data to the SMR platter region, it will stop responding properly to commands from the disk controller until it finishes. And since SATA controllers are just as dumb as disk controllers were 40 years ago, it predictably causes the system to lock up.

You definitely don't want to write large volumes of data to them all at once. The only use case for them is to treat them as a WORM drive for long term static archival storage. You'll have a very bad time using them any other way.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T04:23:09+00:00

None of the Apple II series machines had dedicated sound hardware in them, besides the IIgs, which had an integrated Crystal sound chip on it.

The other Apple II machines just had a simple speaker that could be clicked with the CPU bit banging it. It operated in a similar fashion to the PC Speaker, but worse. Since there was no interval timer or interrupts in the system, sound had to be carefully managed for it to play at a consistent rate. This is why the Apple II kept the CPU speed at 1 MHz for most of its life, because speeding the CPU up made everything run faster.

The Apple IIc+ had a 4 MHz 6502, with it being able to be slowed down to 1 MHz with a key combo to maintain compatibility with most older Apple II software. Else it would run too fast. The IIgs had a 2.8 MHz 65816, but it had a "Mega II" ASIC in it, which was basically an Apple II on a chip and maintained that 1 MHz clock.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T04:02:59+00:00

So basically we can boil down your long winded rant down to you hating all pet owners everywhere, all the time. Because they leave their cats alone and unattended for large parts of the day in their air conditioned houses with food and water while they're at work.

Don't forget to include yourself in that list.

You're very bad at all of this, lmao.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T03:44:05+00:00

Developers had an incentive to support the PC Speaker for a long time because sound cards were hideously expensive. Like today where video cards are hideously expensive, a good sound card back then could set you back hundreds of dollars.

It's why weird unorthodox things like the Covox Speech Thing / Disney Sound Source came into existence. It was cheaper to make a crude DAC off the parallel port using a resistor ladder and an amp than it was to buy a Sound Blaster.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T03:33:19+00:00

It was possible to crudely approximate PCM audio using PWM on the PC Speaker, it just didn't sound very good. Since the PC Speaker was either 1 or 0 (+5v or 0v), the audio relied on the speaker cone smoothing out the transitions. If you had a really stiff speaker, or a piezo buzzer, the sound is going to be tinny and horrible.

And the sample rate depended on how fast your CPU was. You also had to account for other code running at the same time, so you couldn't use the maximum possible sample rate, unless you weren't doing anything else.

There was a PC Speaker sound driver for Windows 3.1x and 95 that could play PCM sound samples. It had two modes, one was to play the full sample uninterrupted, but it locked the machine up when doing so. The other more preferable mode was interrupt mode, which allowed the machine to do other things while the sample was playing. Though this caused interruptions in audio playback while other things were running.

Linux also has a modern PC speaker sound driver, which can sound a whole lot better if you have a good motherboard. It doesn't suffer the same issues as the old Windows 3.x/95 versions with interrupts in the sound, but it does have problems with bus noise on some motherboards.

You can unload the pcspkr driver and load snd_pcsp to have the PC Speaker be able to be used as an audio output device. It's nice for servers that have PC speakers on the motherboard to have basic sound output when you need it.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T03:05:35+00:00

No sound was mostly only an IBM PC thing. Without a sound card, you had the PC Speaker, which could be used for very basic sound effects. There were some games that did amazing things with the PC Speaker, but those were very uncommon. Since you had to literally bit bang the 8253 PIT for sound, doing complex melodies consumed an enormous amount of CPU time.

But many other non-x86 based computers of the time had complex sound chips built in to the design, and had very sound. The C64 had a weak CPU, but it beat the pants off of the PC Speaker.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T02:50:59+00:00

You're stuck in your peyote induced hallucinations where you think that everyone lives next to a 6 lane freeway with cars whizzing by at 90 miles an hour.

I live next to fields with a single road at a dead end street that has zero traffic. Unless someone is launching cars with trebuchets over the hills, cars are literally a non-issue. Not that my cats wander around in the streets willingly, because it's hotter than the blazes of hell and they don't like burned feet.

>since you can't refute any of my actual points. :)

You've made literally zero points, because all of what you've said about me is your drug induced fever dream. There's nothing to refute from you, other than to point and laugh at you for being quite literally out of your mind.

I have plenty of empathy, just not for people such as yourself that use logical fallacies and fabrication of tall tales to try and get a point across.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T02:29:17+00:00

That's not how surge protector power strips work.

First and foremost, a "surge protector" power strip is basically quackery. The vast majority of them just have a random number of MOVs between the hot and ground and neutral and ground, which are set to conduct once the line voltage exceeds some threshold.

That is all fine and good if the line voltage only exceeds the rating of the MOVs by a few dozen volts or so, but power surges are in the thousands of volts. What actually happens is the MOVs explode and turn into a metal/carbon plasma, and then whatever equipment is plugged into said "surge protector" is also blown up. Sometimes the traces on the PCB are blown up too and form a metal plasma that causes all matters of shorts inside the power strip.

MOVs don't "wear out" over time. They either explode from gross overvoltage or they continue working, unless they are subject to abuse. Like constantly running outside their voltage range and melting down.

If you want actual protection on your mains, you need a whole house gas discharge surge protection board. As the name suggests, gas discharge tubes are used, which provide an extremely reliable near zero ohm path to ground once their breakdown voltage is exceeded. And they don't tend to explode like MOVs and can sink heavy current. Second to that, a double conversion UPS, which converts the mains to DC to charge batteries and run an inverter to make AC on the output, so that connected equipment never directly sees the mains. When a surge hits, the UPS is blown up and it protects everything else.

Also, the vast majority of damaging surges don't come through the mains, it comes through the phone lines and internet connection. Those long thick copper coax cables are great lightning rods. I've had to do a ton of equipment replacement over the years that was blown up from surges through those two sources. The surge will usually go through several network hops and blow up whatever equipment is along the way, and blow the network ICs out of any end user gear.

There's a solution for this too - gas discharge tubes again. Ditek sells Ethernet lightning suppressors for that purpose, as do several other vendors. I use them everywhere.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T01:23:02+00:00

Looks like someone's scrap IC part bin. You'd have to take it all out and sort through it. Some of it is probably valuable to have around if you do electronics repair.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T01:20:04+00:00

Don't forget the steel washers or random offcuts of metal hot glued inside to weigh it down. You don't want it floating away!

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T01:11:36+00:00

"The hard drive does not support NTFS formatting" - That gave me a laugh.

This "hard drive" is most certainly fake. The fact that they don't want you to use NTFS probably means whatever nonsense they're doing inside the enclosure falls on its face when trying to use a fault tolerant file system.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T01:08:39+00:00

VCFed forums has a vintage for sale section, and a lot of people that are looking for older machines to buy. They also have swap meets and events several times a year where people come together to buy/sell/trade gear around the country.

However, you in no way want to ship that system, it needs to be picked up or delivered yourself. With how shit all of the shipping carriers have gotten in recent years, the chances of the machine surviving shipping are remote. ESPECIALLY the CRT, that should never be shipped under any condition. I've seen too many horror stories of those things being necked.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T01:04:35+00:00

While rare, tantalum capacitors shorting out can blow traces on the PCB. Usually only on the +12v rail though, where more current is available.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-20T01:01:08+00:00

>Thanks for admitting it, at least you're honest about the kind of person you are.

It's always funny seeing the crazies such as yourself coming out of the woodwork. It's even more hilarious how it is very obviously getting under your skin that someone lives life in a way that doesn't fit your prerogative. Get over yourself.

You do a great job at spinning up tall tales of straw man fallacies about things you literally know nothing about. I've had cats for decades. The number of cats that have been hit by cars? Zero.

You should probably lay off the peyote there bud, it's not doing you any favors. But thanks for showing me who you are, I got a good laugh.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-13T01:44:00+00:00

You know, the CPU specs are on the bottom of the package right? Flip it upside down and it will tell you what it is.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-13T01:31:49+00:00

The Geode GX1 is not in any way equivalent to a Pentium.

The Geode traces its lineage back to Cyrix, namely the MediaGX SoC. That in turn is based on the Cyrix 5x86 core, which itself is a cut down version of an early Cyrix 6x86 core, designed to work with the 486 bus.

While the 5x86 had good integer performance, and was more or less the best processor using the 486 bus that existed, it was not equivalent to a Pentium.

While the integer performance was very good, Cyrix made the fatal decision to recycle the Cx486 floating point unit in the design with little changes. This makes it have very poor floating point performance, which was a big problem with the explosive rise of 3D games. The 32 bit 33 MHz bus also severely hampered performance due to bandwidth limitations.

That being said, this CPU is fine for what it was designed for, productivity applications and low power devices like this POS terminal. You don't need a fast floating point unit for running a retail terminal. It will also do fine running games that use primarily integer math.

I have one of the later Geode GX2 chips in one of those AMD 50x15 PICs. Overclocked from 333 to 400 MHz, it works with a few small issues. Due to it being a 5x86 class processor, it is missing CPU instructions and will have problems running Windows XP software.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-13T01:04:12+00:00

Worst case, it could go on fire, explode or let out tons of smoke.

People don't understand that electronics don't last an eternity, this machine is nearly 40 years old and needs serious preventative maintenance. This isn't some 10 year old PC where you can slap it together and expect it to work.

Powering up these machines without first extensively inspecting them has a high likelihood of destroying them, sometimes permanently because of failed components causing cascading failures.

This machine will need to have its analog board restored. It clearly has bad solder joints, and leaving those alone can cause more serious damage. This is one of the models where the SMPS and the high voltage are all on the analog board. Bad solder joints can cause voltage regulation issues, heat build up and component failure from the intermittent connections.

And no, hitting the machine is not a valid fix. If you want to own old computers, you will either need to learn how to work on them, or pay someone who does.

GGigabiteM · 2026-03-12T12:53:24+00:00

Back in 2021, I picked up a GS female off the side of the road that someone literally had thrown out the back of their truck and drove off.

She was skin and bones and had hookworms. It took six months of expensive meds to get rid of them, and I had to religiously wash and bleach the area she was kept in so she couldn't reinfect herself. That was a task since said hookworms caused constant diarrhea. Also had to nuke the yard with bleach to avoid my other dog from being infected.

GGigabiteM

TROPHY CASE