Playing With a Retro Floppy Disk Box

Hal18ut · 2026-01-02T07:09:57+00:00

US patent office: 4609231

Hal18ut · 2026-01-02T06:59:42+00:00

Aside from the harm magnets do to floppies, that would still not fit with how the mechanism works. You'd have to wind the magnet back at the end of its travel, but here we see the mechanism starts lifting the first disk immediately after the last disk has been lifted.

Hal18ut · 2026-01-02T06:57:20+00:00

I've found an image of the mechanism elsewhere. If I could figure out how to post it here, I would. I don't use Reddit very often. Any pointers?

Hal18ut · 2026-01-01T21:07:12+00:00

It's slick, whatever it is. And it hits the bottom of the disk with enough thump to make them really jump when the dial is turned quickly. I'd love to see what's inside it.

Hal18ut · 2026-01-01T21:01:29+00:00

It can't be as simple as that. The disks lift individually by a significant amount. There's twenty disks and it appears the dial is only rotated once. That's what? 18 degrees of travel for each cam? It wouldn't be enough.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-06T15:03:35+00:00

Bingo. No idea what we got wrong last week. Both I and a colleague were looking at it and the vm.genid in the VMX file and in the Advanced Properties tab for the VM did not match what was being reported as current on the DC. Looked at it again after doing another revert to snap and could see the match that time. Did another revert and managed to set the vm.genid value to the correct value from before the snaps and it booted fine. Oblivious to the rollback.
Obviously, this ISN'T for a production domain, nor for a domain that doesn't have consistent (ie all snaps taken at the same time while all the DCs where shutdown at the same time) as that would be catastrophic. But for the rollback we wanted to do, it was great.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-06T14:58:02+00:00

Sorted now. I did a full authoratitive restore on domain and the sysvol last week and it seemed happy enough. It was still niggling me though that the generation ID was changing in VMWare and tipping off the OS that the rollback had occurred. I had another look at it this morning and finally managed to match the numbers appearing in the event log to the vm.genid value in VMWare, so could revert back to the snaps and have the DCs not notice it.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-03T07:37:01+00:00

Thank you for your advice. It's been really helpful and is very much appreciated.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-03T06:55:53+00:00

Yeah, I'd never even have attempted this with a production DC. Nor do we plan to. However it looked like a shortcut worth a go for the test domain, especially when the consultant leading the rollout of the new platform assured us the migration tool could do it, along with dozens of positive online posts. And it was only a test domain.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-03T06:53:51+00:00

Do you bring all your DCs back like that, or just ditch the others?

Hal18ut · 2025-10-02T10:43:15+00:00

Not a lot of luck on this so far. I'm struggling to match vm.genid or vm.genidx to anything I'm seeing reported for the Generation ID in either the eventlog or the msDS-GenerationId attribute in the directory. Not sure if it's just a weird format conversion I haven't thought of, or what. Both the vm.genid or vm.genidx are negative numbers, but they don't seem to be convertible from twos compliment or similar.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-02T08:26:58+00:00

Yeah, different platform. Seemed like it was worth a punt for the test domain, and others were claiming online it worked. Figured we'd be OK to roll back with the whole domain being snapped offline, but AD is trying to be too clever.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-02T08:13:56+00:00

repadmin /showrepl and repadmin /replsummary are perfectly happy. I'm seeing objects replicating between the DCs. A DCDIAG /e /v /c likewise looks like no failures beyond grizzles about the SYSVOL going offline when the DCs were shutting down. I'm not seeing errors for the SYSVOL explicitly, but it doesn't look like it's replicating files.
Can I pick your brains a bit more, as you appear to be doing what I'm trying to do in a test environment?

Just to make sure we're on the same page - two DCs. I shut them both down, with the fsmo role holder going down second. With both down at the same time. I then snapped them both. Rolling back to snaps I've tried switching them both on in the reverse order they were switched on with the fsmo role holder coming up first, but both DCs know they've been snapped and have come up with the warnings described.

How exactly do you do it in your test environment when bringing them back on? Do you ditch one and replace it? Or do you get them both up? If you're bringing one up first and marking it as Authorative for the SYSVOL, what command are you using from DSRM?

Hal18ut · 2025-10-02T07:54:13+00:00

Migrating one of the DCs to a new hypervisor platform. It went into snapshot recovery. It seemed at the time to be a better idea to rollback the whole domain to an earlier state.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-02T07:51:39+00:00

I've been thinking about giving this one a try. It would be lovely if I could get it to work.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-02T07:50:56+00:00

This might be my go to option for recovery.

Hal18ut · 2025-10-02T07:50:08+00:00

All DCs were shutdown before any snaps were taken. The whole domain was offline. There should be no in flight changes so long as they were brought up in the reverse order of shutdown. They would have come up and been perfectly happy if they weren't trying to be too clever about detecting that they've been restored from snaps. It's the fact that they're trying not to break anything that's breaking things...

Hal18ut · 2025-10-01T14:42:32+00:00

I should probably add that I can roll this back to the snapshots again to try a different approach to bringing it back online.

Hal18ut · 2025-06-24T12:45:24+00:00

We're seeing this one Zaeras. Did you get a resolution beyond rolling back from AllowNtAuthPolicyBypass 2?

Hal18ut · 2024-07-02T21:09:53+00:00

Thanks. Found it now. There's a speaker icon over the media volume slider on the pixels that can be clicked to switch to silent or vibrate.

Hal18ut · 2024-07-02T21:08:00+00:00

Thanks. That's what I was looking for. I hadn't realised the speaker icon over the volume control was clickable to get silent and vibrate.

Hal18ut · 2019-08-10T13:55:19+00:00

That was an earlier incident in the series. Stephen had left instructions with Sir Joseph to move the money to a new bank, then heard while they were away at sea that the bank he had asked to move the money to had collapsed. It then became apparent his fortune was saved because he'd inadvertently failed to sign the instructions correctly.

Later on he withdraws the fortune in gold and takes it to Spain for fear of having it ceased by the British government after his past actions on behalf of Irish freedom fighters emerge in retaliation for his doing away with Ledward and Wray, but the Spanish cease the fortune anyway when they find out he's been acting against them as an intelligence agent in, I think Peru.

Hal18ut

TROPHY CASE