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Updated 12/31/2004: First revision.
My adventures with:
AND
Email me at:
Updated 12/31/2004: First revision.
Buildup
Software Loadup
Power Consumption
Cpu-Z report
External USB Hard drive
Toshiba Laptop
I collected this information mainly for my own purposes.
In very late 2004, I decided to take the plunge and invest $139 in the Fry's electronic's motherboard/CPU combo. At the same time I purchased an Antec SLK1650B case that seems nice and quiet. Details of the innards of the motherboard and CPU specifics, see the Cpu-Z report, below. The short description is the CPU is a 2.53GHz P4, boxed; and the motherboard is a PcChips "M950 (V3.3). It is based on a Via chipset P4x400, it has integrated with Lan, audio (no video), USB2 (no firewire).
The main consideration was the bundle price was inexpensive... ok, it was cheap. The motherboard uses something of a bastard Via chipset. I have a feeling I would be ultimately far better off with a more popular intel chipset but there you have it, the motherboard represented around only $30 of the bundle price(!). Two weeks after I bought this bundle, Fry's had a different bundle using a slightly slower P4 (2.4GHz) but bundled with a motherboard that used an Intel chipset, oh well -- what's done is done.
In some vague way, I want to try do try some HTPC (home theatre PC) stuff. I have a donated, older, All-in-wonder graphics board. I also figured someday Imay need to have something more modern than the couple of Celeron 600MHz-class PC's i have laying around the house.
LAN controller builtin, Via Rhine II, MAC 00-0A-E6-DC-67-7A(?). Ndis driver from cd works w/ghost fetxxx??
In addition to the new case, CPU and Motherboard -- i used some PC2100 DDR RAM i had laying around, and a donated ATI Rage 128 pro (32MB memory) all-in-wonder AGP for graphics, and whatever old IDE hard disk i could find.
Upon assembling the motherboard, CPU, memory, case and whatnot the first problem I encountered was that the power supply wouldn't even turn on. Serious. Swapping around another powersupply and motherboard indicated the new motherboard was the problem. After a quick trip to fry's, the problem was quickly revealed to be the position of the CMOS jumper (apparently this manufacturer ships with the jumper in the "cleared" position -- which prevents the motherboard from doing anything... OK so I should have caught this one myself. There is a rumor that this position saves the battery life?).
I also stumbled on figuring out how to get the CPU to go the rated speed. My CPU is 19x (locked). The system was reporting 1.9GHz, i.e. 19 times a 100MHz clock. The settings in the bios for clock speed were grayed out. I was stumped. Eventually I discoverd that there were jumpers(!) to change the CPU clock -- so once I moved them the speed was as advertized.
Loaded up Windows XP Pro service pack 2, seemed to go pretty well. XP loads without discovering the audio so you need to use either the CD or download from PcChips. I used the download audio driver, as well as download lan driver -- which appeared to be a newer version.
Couldn't load Win98 -- I forget why...never tried to figure that one out.
There is very little in the way of included software from PcChips. The included CD seems to have some drivers, i couldn't really figure out most of it. You will need the audio driver (says something like AC97 driver for Via VT823). Not sure about the rest. Although the bios provides a "system monitor" type page with voltages and fanspeeds, there is nothing on the CD to let you see this in windows. I downloaded a snazzy little program, MotherboardMonitor 5 and that worked fine (it doesn't ahve an exact match for the model number but it works anyway).
Norton Ghost: Ghost ran fine as expected. the only hitch was using the built in lan for a peer-to-peer ghosting. Ghost didn't include a driver for it that I could find, but the ndis driver on the motherboard's CD: FETND.DOS This worked fine, I booted up and connected to a shared drive on my network and could do a backup or restore from there.
Linux: I loaded both Redhat 9.? ("Shrike") and Fedora Core 3. This all seemed to go okay except I got thrown off thinking the graphics (r128 in XFree86, or Xorg-speak) didn't work. In actuality, my problem was the monitor wasn't syncing. To fix that i learned that to otherwise prevent automatic booting into graphics mode you must edit the file /etc/inittab (boot with a rescue disk, if necessary) and change the default runlevel to 3. Then I had to jigger the X configuration file in /etc/X11/xinit.conf (?exact name?) and restrict monitor resolutions and refresh rates.
Power Consumption (note, this was with cpu clock at 100MHz, i.e. 1.9GHz CPU):
WinXP varied from 63W (idling), to 78W (100% cpu). Typical running BeyondTV was 75W.
Other interesting factoids: Cpu fan 1.4W, 120mm case fan that I don't use 2.3W, Linksys wirelessB pci card 1.9W, Hard disk 6.8W, Unit powered off 7.5W, Unit powered off and rocker switch on back of power supply switched off 1.7W (! uses power even when switched off!)
Other Minutia
When linux boots up, it can't find the d-link wireless card. it says something abount Orinoco PCI card unable to start or not found or something. (but it was detected or whatever by installation?). It is a Dlink DWL-522? wireless B pci adapter. Also i have a Linksys WMP-11 card that was proving unreliable (connection dropped when transferring large files) in XP -- so i put in the dlink. Also of interest: the antenna from the Linksys was significantly longer (maybe like 5", to the Dlink's 3") and it works better on both cards that the shortie. I got the linksys at a yard sale.
http://www.geexbox.org/en/index.html This is an amazing Linux based project that simply boots off a CD and provides a basic UI that allows playing various audio video files.
I downloaded 0.98.5, burned it and booted. It booted up very quickly, less than 1 minute. The hardware all seemed to play nice together, and i was able to play Mpeg2, Xvid and DivX video off the hard drive, the audio worked fine. My video was output to VGA (as far as I can tell, my video card's TV-out will not work in Linux). The builtin lan defaults to 192.168.0.54, I hooked it directly up to an XP box with shares. GeexBox will automatically mount any shares that are available, and video played fine off them (100mbit wired lan). I cannot get my wireless cards going so i wasn't able to try over a wireless.
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BiosID (to get the program, search for bioid.zip. I found the program here): 62-0423-001131-00101111-040201, AMI AMI Bios's Motherboard ID program says: manufacturer - Elitegroup Computer systems (ECS); Build tag: M950 version: 1.0 I flashed bios with one from PcChip's site because I thought it was different but it turned out to be the one and only (identical to what was already in the motherboard). |
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This was a bundle, the empty enclosure and a Hitachi 160G hard drive for $70 after MIRs. The enclosure is a particularly cheesy/cheapo plastic frame with a sort of thick aluminum foil covering.
The controller is VID:PID 04b4:6830 Cypress Semiconductor Corp. USB-2.0 IDE. It works seamlessly in Windows XP, and Linux (Geexbox). Works with DOS (especially useful for Ghosting) with a driver, discussed below.
Someone going by the handle madmaxUSB posted a rather elaborate writeup about using the USBASPI driver for DOS with external mass storage devices, it's on the computing.net forum in this thread.
There are three standards compliant controllers in PC's. In Windows, Go to ControlPanel - System and (look under Hardware or DeviceManager to) examine the listed devices under Universal Serial Bus Controllers to determine the type of USB ports detected:
USB 1.x UHCI (Universal Host Controller Interface) Intel, VIA
USB 1.x OHCI (Open Host Controller Interface) Compaq, Microsoft and National Semiconductor
USB 2.x EHCI (Enhanced Host Controller Interface)
I got the panasonic USBASPI driver v2.20 , and also the older one v2.06 from Panasonic japan site. Also need the DI1000DD driver from Novac, another Japanese site. To make work in DOS mainly just put this in config.sys:
device=USBASPI.SYS /w /v
device=di1000dd.sys /dL
DOS (Ghost) performance, USB1.1 and using old Fujitsu drive ~ 1MB/sec, USB2 ~ 6MB/sec. Windows USB2 ~ 10MB/sec
I placed DOS drivers and an untried Win98 into AppInstalls\drivers\USB_EXT, also made an .img file which is suitable for creating a bootable CD-R.
By the way, I wondered if it would control 2 hard drives, given suitable power so I cabled up two drives but would only recognize one drive so maybe the Cypress chip has a limitation?
Updates, as of October 2005: I burned the image onto a bootable CD and it works fine on both the cheapie Fry's mobo, and also on an old Compaq Presario 1266 laptop i inheirited. It FAILED, however, on a Dell Inspirion 8500... hung after assigning the drive letters, so i gave up on that one (I was able to boot it and ghost via Bart's Netwok Boot Disk, which worked great, by the way).
hdparm -i -- LBAsects=268435455
smartctl version 5.26
Device Model: HDS722516VLAT80
Serial Number: VN643ECDDRLJPD
Firmware Version: V34OA6MA
Static bag label says --P/N: 14R9248; MLC: BA1254; S/N:
CDDRLJPD quickcheck warr
exp: 2007-05-30, which probably transferred from the old drive
which had a date of the 29th. This is a scam because the drive
supposedly has a 3 year warrantee so I lost like a whole year
from the get-go.
(RMA'ed drive!) bag label says --P/N: 14R9248; MLC: BA1027; S/N:
C4GYK60M
This drive is pretty quiet. It comes with acoustic managment set to it's loudest (highest performance) setting. Hitachi has two tools, both here. The FT, Feature Tool is used to change the acoustics. Another useful one is their DRive Fitness Test -- which includes utilities to zero out drive, etc. I created AppInstalls\drivers\Diskutils\Hitachi which contains the downloads, and also the ready-to-run programs.
When we returned home from Tahoe on July 16, 2005, the tivo appeared stalled/hung (it would ping, but that was about it). Hitachi DFT gave some error code, it wanted to try and fix (remap sectors?) but i just sent it in and received a new drive July 28, 2005. This drive passed DFT, both quick and advanced. Then i did a full backup/restore from the hacked but unexpanded drive i was using in the meantime, a WD 160GB. That took about an hour or so.
purchased at Bestbuy Ahwatukee 6/6/2007 for $750 from the sunday flyer.
The disk does not have a recovery partition. It has some sort of special Toshiba partition (type 0x27) that is about 1.5GB, I don't know what that is for, it is something called WinRE. But the whole rest of disk was dedicated to C drive.
I don't have the SD Memory Boot Utility, normally in the Toshiba | utilities (only the SD format utility -- which is just the same as right-click and format, it seems). So I found something like it on support.toshiba.com , it installed and ran ok. I put a Win98 EBD (emergency boot disk) image on a SD card. It copies the image as a wierd file name -- $TOSFD00.VFD. In any event this laptop apparently doesn't have the bios trickery to boot from it. So anyway, booting from the DVD/CD drive works fine so I use that to boot to DOS if need be. It should be able to boot from a USB stick but I haven't tried that yet. Also, ghost works fine so that is good. On a happier note, I used the hp key drive boot utility to create a bootable usb stick from the aforementioned EBD image -- and that worked just fine, just select boot from USB in the toshiba's bios setup, or hit F12(?) for a one-time boot menu. It worked on 2 different flash sticks, one was a corsair, and the other a PNY.
I re-did from the supplied recovery DVD set (2), when i did it I had it only use 120G for the c drive. The rest was unallocated. I used the "systemRescueCD" and booted to Ranish and added all the unused space as a logical partition, then created a logical FAT32 of about 25G. There is now about 5G free in the logical partition. (Vista can only make NTFS partitions, apparantly?)
(I found out later that Vista can resize partitions, so i really didn't need to use the recovery dvds) Also of note: the recovery from the supplied Toshiba DVDs takes a LOOOOONG time, maybe an hour. The file copy is pretty quick -- BUT once Vista boots up it goes through many reboots. I was convinced that it was stuck in a reboot loop, i even called toshiba support, but while i was waiting it actually finally finished okay. With that done, I was about to run ghost, and saved two versions, each is around 5GB total (each is split into 3 files):
S-1.GHO: Uninstalled via autoruns --
Uninstalled via control panel --
Installed
S-2.GHO: Uninstalled-- Office and Works (and also moved the folder in root of c:\WORKSSETUP to e:)
Installed--
4696521e46a4b9e272a6d959480e9c02 *S-1.GHO ac4f9dbc5c5ee32a00fffbb538048bf9 *S-100001.GHS fbb5376e5736f8a73d7cc9438ae2271e *S-100002.GHS f7bf08b707ba4b11f98b8a6ef091ad43 *S-2.GHO 9051b460079d94b3f3783778df4fd459 *S-200001.GHS a60d6dfad201be3d04c2027188428a7b *S-200002.GHS
These files will be copied to DVDs for backup.
Toshiba Satellite A205-S4577 Model number: PSAF0U-01Q009 serial number: 47178241Q
Vista Home Premium, Toshiba OEMact W24DJ-4TPQV-MXH94-D2W4V-TFDRQ
Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945A : 00-19-D2-BA-22-7C Marvell Yukon 88E80 : 00-A0-D1-75-C8-02
Installed Fedora Core 7 64 bit seeing as how it has a 64 bit core (Core 2 Duo T5300). I re-did the unused space so that there was about 7G available, and 1G for swap. The install went fine. I didn't want it to mess with the boot, so I didn't let it install a boot loader. I needed to boot the DVD again, and rescue by copying the vmlinuz and so forth to the FAT32 drive, then used loadlin as usual (from a DOS boot):
loadlin vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img cl=ro root=/dev/sda6 rhgb
the wireless works with the following command lines, same as I used with the atmelwlandriver on the KnoppMyth project (but I don't know where fedora wants the config file?):
iwconfig wlan0 essid whatever key open NNNNNNNNNN dhclient wlan0
I haven't tried eth0 yet but I don't expect any trouble.
I did a dd to copy the MBR and the boot track of the hard drive, /dev/sda -- the files are called toshmbr.bin, and toshboot.bin
It boots up and runs the gui just fine. I don't understand what Suspend is supposed to do -- it looks suspended, but i can't get it to wake up, and have to force the power off.