[Herts] On the scrounge for a hard drive

[Malcolm Smith]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 07:32:37AM +0000, David Honour wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:35:00 +0000 (GMT)
> Ash Thakrar <asht_007 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > Hi Steve
> > 
> > I have few spare drives and can pass it onto you.
> > Please email.
>
> I also have spare drives, i think a 20gig and a 40gig (had windoze me
> on it which died, but i put Gentoo on it and it seemed ok).

Does anyone still have any spare hard disks?
The boot drive in my main workstation (Pentium III 450MHz!) is a very
old Fujitsu 4200rpm 4GB drive (!), half full of my minimal Debian OS.
But it's been exhibiting an increasing number of errors recently, and
is very slow, especially in swap-storms :-)

Yes I know I can buy a new comp for £200, but I don't have £200 spare.
I was considering trying to boot from a cheap 4GB CF card with IDE-CF
adaptor, but there are issues for small writes, which an OS does a lot.
Buying a small proper SSD might be worth it eventually but for now, any
old IDE drive of 4-40GB would be fine - quieter is more important than
larger capacity which is unnecessary as I have /home on another 400GB
disk. I don't think it's possible to just copy / onto my /home disk and
then edit /etc/fstab, definitely not while the machine is running. My
old BIOS won't boot CDROMs, so my only rescue disk is TomsRtBt floppy,
which IIRC doesn't support large HDDs.

I don't know if I can make the meeting tonight but might try if someone
can bring a spare disk (let me know). Otherwise PM me offlist and I can
arrange to collect it.


Many thanks
-- 
Malcolm
http://www.thesmith.org.uk/     Personal site of unfathomable depths
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