imroy's Journal: A second son... er Sun on the way!

When I got a second-hand SPARCstation LX two years ago it became an in-joke for my family to talk about my "sun" as if they were saying "son". Just thought I'd explain the title of this JE. And now I will soon have a second Sun to play with.

You see, in recent months my mum has become an eBay junkie. She's already gotten Scott 640MiB of DDR RAM (freeing up 512MiB of SDR RAM for the rest of us), a Tekram SCSI card to replace the crappy ISA Adaptec card that originally came with our ScanMaker scanner, a new SCSI cable to connect said scanner with said card, and a cordless telephone. On Saturday she won a bid for a SPARCstation 10, for $AUS81. With shipping from Melbourne, it'll be around $AUS100 or $US61. We still have to figure out how I'll pay that off. Lots of chores I bet. And just today she "accidentally" won a combined lot containing a 4.5G disk, two 1.05G disks, a CDROM drive, and tape drive - all SCSI. She thought the price would go up with the half-decent tape drive (Sony SDT-5000), but it didn't and she won.

I/We will still need to find a use for this extra hardware. Mum is asking about backup strategies. A few weeks ago she had the 41G disk in her machine kinda-fail. Apparently it wouldn't boot, the BIOS asking for a system disk. So she put in a 3G disk from Scotts machine which still had win98 on it. It started booting, Nortons Disk Doctor complained about not finding a partition signature on the 41G disk and offered to fix it. Everything went downhill from there. I was able to put another hard disk containing Linux in, and use Gpart to scan for partitions. It found the (rarely used) Linux filesystem and swap partition no problem, but couldn't find the Fat32 filesystem no matter how rigorous the scan. Alas, no amount of fiddling or seaching hexdumps could turn up mums data in the form of a filesystem. I even hacked together a FAT32 searcher myself because I couldn't believe that Gpart hadn't found a FAT32 filesystem. It looks like NDD must have mangled up the beginning of the fs when it tried to "rescue" it. So mum has lost lots of data. But on the good side, she now has lots of free space :P

Anyway, I'd better end this before I ramble too much. In summary: I'll have new computer gear soon, I have to work to repay my parents somehow and we're looking at backups after a loss (as it always happens).

On a final note: It's nice to see the Iraqi people are finally free from an unelected ruler installed by military force... :P