Stereodude
Not really a
Job security+++
Something Random
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
ddrueding
Fixture
Job security = multiple jobs. No single points of failure other than me.
PetaPixel: 204-megapixel photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The 14,400 x 14,200 pixel image here.
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
A lot of employers explicitly prohibit moonlighting because of its effect on job performance. In some places it's even illegal to moonlight. Even if not, there's a lot of legal stuff to worry about:
https://www.nurse.com/blog/2018/01/22/dont-land-in-legal-hot-water-when-moonlighting/
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-my-employer-fire-me-for-working-a-second-job.html
The artifacts make the image look over processed, but interesting anyway. The dimensions are a bit odd.
Stereodude
Not really a
I found this entertaining.
Stereodude
Not really a
Or you could have watched the video.
sedrosken
Florida Man
My problems ended up boiling down to a particular RAM stick. Almost a month's worth of messing around thinking my board was dead too and it was a 35 dollar fix. Ech.
With the new security vulnerabilities coming to light from hyperthreading on pre-8th gen Intel chips, I'm almost glad I have the 3570K instead of the 3770K.
With the new security vulnerabilities coming to light from hyperthreading on pre-8th gen Intel chips, I'm almost glad I have the 3570K instead of the 3770K.
Newtun
Storage is nice, especially if it doesn't rotate
You could consider adding RAM test software, such as MemTest86, to your diagnostic kit.
Newtun
Storage is nice, especially if it doesn't rotate
I'm not sure the various spectre/meltdown/... variants require hyper-threading; at least some of them may work on any multi-core processor.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
IIRC, most Spectre variants will work even on single core systems lacking HyperThreading... It's all about speculative execution engine having faults reading memory into cache when it shouldn't. IIRC, the last Intel CPU that was immune to both Meltdown/Spectre were the Atom N5x0 series (these have in-order-execution engines similar to the Pentium and Pentium MMX cpus). These were pretty much only used in Netbooks and Nettop systems. (Note: Hyper-Threading only makes the attack easier, and is not a mitigation simply disabling it).
sedrosken
Florida Man
Already long since done. A large portion of my (admittedly aging) diagnostic toolkit is basically just a Hiren's BootCD, which has MemTest86+ on it already -- I just thought there might have been some issues with my board as well considering I've personally never before this had a RAM stick just go bad out of the blue, and said board has been finicky in the past.
Stereodude
Not really a
I've now eaten at Ike's. My Tony Soprano was pretty tasty on SF Sourdough.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
Stereodude
Not really a
Yes. It wasn't that specific location that's the chain.
sedrosken
Florida Man
Because as we all know I simply cannot just leave well enough alone, I've elected to undertake the monumental task of getting Windows NT 4 set up and playing nice on the Pentium Pro machine. Thorough testing and troubleshooting have revealed that it really, really does not like my SD to IDE adapter -- I can prepare the disk when bootstrapping setup from the floppy disks and supplying the driver disk for my Ultra66 card, but it seems to hang when trying to actually, y'know, do the first boot and junk. So my solution to this problem is hopefully to set it up onto another drive, and then clone said drive to a partition on the SD card, copy over the MBR and edit the boot.ini accordingly, and finally for good measure drop in the ntdetect.com and ntldr from Windows 2000 so I can expand the size of the partition to take up the whole rest of the card and still have NT be able to boot.
Why I'm not just using Windows 2000 instead is something I ask myself more and more as I keep failing. The CPU is a bit weak for running 2000 day-to-day, since the shell is basically like taking an IE window and running it in the background all the time... but 9x underperforms on first-run P6 anyway. It's a hard decision to make, really. I backed up my original 98 SD card just to have something to fall back to if this experiment ends up being a total wash.
Why I'm not just using Windows 2000 instead is something I ask myself more and more as I keep failing. The CPU is a bit weak for running 2000 day-to-day, since the shell is basically like taking an IE window and running it in the background all the time... but 9x underperforms on first-run P6 anyway. It's a hard decision to make, really. I backed up my original 98 SD card just to have something to fall back to if this experiment ends up being a total wash.
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Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
Those that don't learn history are doomed to repeat it... or something like that...
sedrosken
Florida Man
Nope, purely for my own
If this doesn't work out Windows 2000 and litestep replacing Windows Explorer seems like a slightly viable option, if only for something more off the beaten path. My problem is that I've used 2000, XP and 98SE on enough machines that not only do I know them like the back of my hand, I find them boring. There's no conflict with any of them. Well, on this machine there may be conflicts with XP -- mainly that I barely meet the minimum requirements for running it. That might be something fun to see sometime when I'm really bored.
Basically, my goals at this point are thus:
- Dual boot MS-DOS 7.1 with NT 4 on my SD to IDE adapter, this can be accomplished by making the proper partitions, installing the operating systems, expanding the partitions to meet my needs and then installing the Windows 2000 NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM so that it'll boot without fuss on such a large drive.
- Start with a bare NT 4 system. No drivers other than for my outboard IDE controller. Install the PnP service and then work on getting drivers installed for everything. Apply the registry fixes that come with the unofficial Banshee driver 1.05, as this will hopefully re-enable my second TMU for D3D stuff.
- Install SP6a, the Post-SP6a Update Rollup, and all the hotfixes that come after it. The first go-around at this ended in tears as NT 4 randomly decided to swap my zip drive's drive letter with that of my boot drive and make all my system services sad. That the Disk Utility's drive letter assignment thing is more of a suggestion than anything didn't help.
- Install the unofficial distribution of DirectX5. This will hopefully enable me to run all those Windows games that demand Direct3D instead of having Glide or OpenGL options, that will actually run properly on such a slow machine.
- Install my games and junk as per normal. Enjoy the slightly increased responsiveness and greatly increased stability of NT 4 over 9x.
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Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
I remember doing this (back in the day when I was still running my P233MMX based system with NT4**), a lot of that games had weird checks for OS version and would fail to run despite having everything that was needed. Most complained about not being WIn98... Also note, you'll also need gfx drivers that supported the DX5 feature set for this to usable for gaming...
My system at the time:
Intel Pentium MMX @233MHz (overclocked to 266MHz) - I could get to 300MHz, but was unstable.
i430TX based motherboard. (Tekram IIRC).
256MB SDRAM. (2x 128MB).
52x CDROM / 8x CD-R
Matrox Mystique 220.
2x 3dfx Voodoo2 12MB SLI.
2.1GB UMDA33 Seagate HDD.
NT4 SP6a / Redhat Linux 5.2 (later 6.1) dual boot.
It could run Windows 2000 (mainly because of the RAM, but was slow), so tried the DX5 patches...
Games that did work:
QuakeGL
Quake II
Total Annihilation
Re: Zip drive - known issue. Best to detach all devices other than boot drive when doing the hotpatches, and reconnect once it's all installed.
sedrosken
Florida Man
Duly noted. I do think my drivers support DX5 as they're from 2001-ish I think, but I could be wrong. That'll be the first thing I look at when things inevitably go wrong. The OS-checks are another matter entirely -- I do believe most of the games I've got queued up to run on this thing support NT 4 either explicitly (Diablo II, idTech engine games) or are known to work (Jazz Jackrabbit 2, UT99). I think I may lose out on The Sims, but given how utterly awfully that performs on there it's no big loss.
Jesus that's a sweet little machine for the day. Makes me very jealous.
The Voodoo2s in particular I look at with envy -- but alas, I don't have the PCI slots to throw around to have a 2D card and two 3D cards hogging my PCI bus. That reminds me, I've got a 233MHz MMX chip just laying around for when I get ahold of a decent socket 7 board. I should pit that against my PPro head-to-head just to see what really matters, MMX or more advanced architecture/much more cache. Also, you probably had performance issues from the 430TX chipset and large amount of RAM -- it's known for only being able to cache 64MB.Ah, ok. You did already know.
Thank you for this tidbit! It'll definitely come in useful. Wish I'd have thought of that last time.
sedrosken
Florida Man
Well, due to the rather "dirty" way NT 4 setup formats NTFS drives (in an extended FAT partition unless you pre-partition the drive, and starting in FAT and then converting to NTFS on the first boot into setup proper) it really, really, really hated my SD to IDE adapter. The bootloader seemed to just hang. I'm thinking it never properly wrote the MBR? Well, anyway. I'm setting it up on a separate drive and I plan to clone it over to my SD adapter once that's done. I'll hope it works, because I'm not swapping away from this SD adapter permanently. It seems the only operating systems with problems with it are NT 3.x and 4, because even DOS works just fine with it, though it occasionally needs some prodding on pre-7 versions to actually write the MBR.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
IIRC WinNT4 could be really picky about UDMA modes for controllers and drives, you could try limiting the SD/IDE adaptor to PIO4 mode?
(My system at the time would hang 95% of the time during boot when UDMA33 was enabled in NT4, otherwise UDMA worked fine with Linux, so I know it wasn't hardware combination).
Re: the i430TX only being able the cache the first 64MB of the address space. I didn't really find this an issue, as the increased RAM made up for any short comings. (Also remember, the L2 at the time were chips on the motherboard, so high latency to begin with).
sedrosken
Florida Man
Well, that explains an awful lot. I don't know how to force it down to a PIO mode on my controller card (it autodetects and doesn't seem to let me change anything), and wouldn't want to anyway -- the increased CPU load for file transfers would render the entire point of installing NT 4 -- i.e., a slightly quicker and more efficient system (remember I'm on first-run P6 here) -- entirely moot.
What I don't get is that my experimental drive is running in a DMA mode as well -- not UDMA4 like the SD adapter, but DMA2. It works just fine, and seems to be running about as fast as drives of that day came. I.E., not very fast at all, but at least it doesn't peg the CPU while it's moving stuff around.
I may try to obtain a different controller and see if that'll work any better, but I may end up just going back to 98SE out of sheer frustration with this whole endeavor. Thankfully I kept a backup image of the drive just before experimentation began.
sedrosken
Florida Man
So apparently the PIIX3 the board uses supports DMA modes, just not UDMA modes, meaning that at least in theory I can get NT 4 to play nice with it...
And apparently I'm a dumbass who doesn't know how to read. The reason it had trouble with drives >8.4GB was because I had the primary IDE channel set to extended CHS mode and not LBA (which was, indeed, an option) -- I have yet to properly test it in LBA mode but I have no reason at present to believe it won't work without issue with my SD card.
We'll just have to see once I'm done making this latest backup of my 98 image, since I've changed an awful lot since the last image and I would hate to have nothing to return to if this doesn't go well much like my previous attempts. Removing the Ultra66 will free up both the PCI slot it occupies and the resources it demands, meaning I'll be able to re-enable my parallel port! Hopefully, anyway...
In other news, I'm starting to run low on disk space on there again. 64GB and it still isn't enough... Oh well. 128GB it is. Soon. This is, of course, assuming I keep all the junk I've got on there right now, and assuming most (if not all) of it even works on NT 4 at all... Plenty of that stuff I really don't care about so long as I can play the LAN party favorites, but a lot of that stuff I'd rather not lose if I don't have to. We'll, again, just have to see.
As for SCSI I have a AVA-1502E in an ISA slot purely so that should I happen upon any peripherals needing it I can make use of it. It's only capable of SCSI-1 transfer rates and is further hamstrung by the ISA bus, but that shouldn't matter too much because it doesn't have a boot ROM anyway. with the Ultra66 gone I'm starting to wonder if maybe I shouldn't upgrade that to a PCI card capable of some higher speeds. Not that I have anything to make use of it anyway, and a SCSI2SD like I was initially thinking I might gravitate towards is awfully expensive for something that's only going to be harder to set up. I think I may just leave that particular aspect alone, and cross that bridge when (and if) I need to.
Stereodude
Not really a
I have no idea why you're reliving the computer challenges of the late 90's 20 years later, but as long as you're having fun...
sedrosken
Florida Man
Yeah, you would think that those that lived through those times sacrificed their sanity so that I wouldn't have to so far later, but let's be honest, I've always been a little strange.