Hard Drive Failure

This spans a few days...

2/20/25: I have a computer problem and need a junker hard drive controller to try and save the data off my master drive. If any of you have junk tower or desk top computers to dump, let me know. The controller in this 20 year old IDE drive failed. If I can salvage a controller from a junker and get it spinning again, I'll be able to save the data. Here's my bad drive...

***UPDATE*** I didn't explain this very well. The IDE controller circuit board that's part of the drive has failed. That's what I need to hopefully salvage a ton of data from the HD unit.

March 6, 2025: Yay!! I have my old shack computer up and running! Recently, I posted about a hard drive failure, where the drive in my old XpPro box stopped spinning. I had procrastinated on backing it up, and had lots of stuff on it I didn't want to lose. I was worried. After checking things as much as I could, I felt like the controller board on the drive had died. I searched eBay, found an identical drive with the same revision # as mine, and bought it. When it arrived, I pulled the board and installed it on my old HD. It came to life, booted up, and all was well. 

Needless to say, I spent the next day moving copies to a jump drive and backing everything up. Whew...that was a close one!

Another Computer Overheating...

 This is another old, overheating, junker computer of mine. I mostly use it for viewing schematics in the shop. Processor power isn't too terribly important, it just needs an O.S. that's new enough to download schematics from a few archive sites. 

Recently, it started shutting down if I began expecting multiple pages to toggle between, and it was showing overheat when I peeped at the bios screen. 

It spends most of its life standing on end in a small gap between cabinets. I pulled it out, popped it open, and found quite a bit of dust. 

It uses a heatsinking system where a manifold is clamped to the processor, a copper tube then conducts heat over to a little "radiator", and a fan blows across that. The heat sink compound had dried to the consistency of baby powder, so I cleaned and replaced that. The fins on the little radiator were packed with lint, so that was cleaned. 

She's reassembled and running with no problems, now. I realize that most folks would have put it in the trash years ago, but it still serves a purpose and is out of the landfill :-)

Computer Overheat, Studio A

 One of my old hamshack computers recently started shutting itself down. After a few events, I started looking around in the bios and found the processor temp was going through the roof. I unplugged everything, and hauled it out to the shop. After popping the covers, I was amazed it had not caught fire! It had more lint than the 35+KV supply in an old color tv!

I vacuumed and blew it out. I found the fan that was supposed to be attached to the processor, had a broken bracket and was laying in the bottom of the cabinet! To top it off, one of the power supplies had a bad fan, and the blower on one of the doors had a failed connector. Wow, 3 non-funcitional fans...

I all fans were repaired, and all is a well in the shack! I used a piece of balsa wood glued to the bottom of the fan as a shim.  A piece of electric fence wire was ised to make a hold-down for the fan. The computer was  bought back around 2003 and runs non-stop. I should probably bring the others to the shop and clean them out!

32 Year Old Keyboard & Cleaning...

I know, I'm a tightwad... I also like old stuff :-) I have an old keyboard that I've used in the shack for years, on several computers. I keep using this old keyboard because I like it, it's small, and doesn't take up my space on the table. It's perfect for my application, and every other keyboard I have looks like a monster beside this thing. It's actually the removable keyboard from an old 1988 Compaq 286 portable computer. It uses some sort of goofy looking round connector that I found an adapter for many years ago, and the adapter uses a PS/2 style socket on the computer. 

The lighting in this photo wasn't good but it's the only thing I had of it before cleaning... If you click the photo you will get the idea of the stains and such..it really looked bad under bright light. Over the years, this thing had become yellowed, dirtied from handling with dirty hands and fingers, etc. This is a non-smoking home, but it looked like it had been in one...yet it never had. I had tried Windex, a little bit of scrubbing bubbles, etc on it, but nothing seemed to work. I was afraid to get too serious on it with liquids. It just kept getting dirtier. My wife had one of those Mr. Clean magic erasers (you wet it, squeeze it out, and it does remarkable things!). I tested one corner of the keyboard and was amazed. 

I grabbed a small screwdriver and popped all of the buttons off of the board, used a little handi-vac to clean behind those, dampened a magic eraser, and got busy. I did it while listening to a shortwave radio show and it took about 2 hours, off and on. Here's the finished keyboard. It looks and works like new. I use it on 2 dual core machines via free software called "Mouse Without Borders". You can see more about that HERE

Dave WB4IUY

www.WB4IUY.net

2 Computers, 1 Mouse/Keyboard!

I run two computers at my operating position in "studio A". Two keyboards and two mice really clutter up the table in front of the radio gear. I stumbled across a piece of free software that allows me to seamlessly slide my cursor from one screen to the other, and the keyboard input follows the mouse. You can copy things to the clipboard in one computer and paste it on the 2nd computer, and even drag single files from one box to the other (only one file at the time, with a 100meg file size limit)

The software was easy to install and ran without a hitch on my junk computers (one old XP Pro box, and an old Dell Optiplex 260 Win7 box). Now, one mouse and 1 mini-keyboard runs both computers at once, I love it! The software is called "Mouse Without Borders". The latest version is on Microsoft and doesn't support XP. I found an older version that does support XP over on cnet. Oh, it'll run up to 4 computers at the same time, too.

I ran multiple monitors on a single computer about 10 years or so ago with a graphics card and some software. In my situation, I'm running multiple 15+ year old boxes at home to share the load, so it looks to be a good answer to my problem. I could buy something new and much faster that would do everything, but I'm a tightwad and am always looking ways to keep old stuff working. It's neat to not to toggle between screens on my primary applications, and everything is fast by each computer running with less overhead. 

Here's a link to the new version for Win7 and newer: 
Mouse-Without-Borders-NEW

Here's a link to the older version that includes Win XP: 
Mouse-Without-Borders-OLD


Dave WB4IUY

http://www.WB4IUY.net

Computers with Legacy Com Ports, & RTTY Interface

I was stranded an d unable to use my RTTY interface on HF, after a near lightning strike blew the 9-pin serial port on my hamshack computer. Thanks to Matt Harris KD4PBS, he had a spare plug-in card for my computer's PCI slot, to add on outboard serial ports! This provided the 9-pin legacy serial port I needed to get my RTTY hardware back working. Once I found the drivers for it, my old box was back up on RTTY.

For those of you who work digital modes, this is something to think about when you build or buy a computer... While you can use soundcard software to work most digital modes (including RTTY), it typically doesn't allow for hard-keying the FSK port of your rig for true RTTY, and often doesn't allow for hard keying your rig for CW. This means you're unable to use your narrow RTTY or CW filters (since you're usually in USB mod for all digital modes). The receiver can easily get overloaded and the waterfall gets washed out by strong stations on nearby frequencies.

There are almost no USB-to serial port dongles that support the 5-bit stream or reprogramming to 45.5 baud for this, so a USB converter is almost out of the question.

Most HF rigs have a terminal in the aux port on the back of rig for FSK control. Even my old Yaesu FT-901's have dedicated FSK and sharp receive filters for this. The majority of the digital mode interfaces that provide an output for FSK keying require a legacy serial or parallel port on the computer for this, and the majority of computers (esp laptops) have only USB ports and such, no physical 9-pin or 25-pin legacy ports. By controlling my RTTY shift through the FSK port, instead of using RTTY TX audio on USB like in DM780, I can use dedicated programs like MMTTY (love it!!) and work RTTY even in crowed contest band conditions. You might want to buy a computer that at least has an expansion port to allow for a serial port card with legacy ports for this.

Anyway, thanks again to Matthew Harris KD4PBS for the card to get my RTTY station back on the air!

Here's a pic from inside the computer, below the new add-on legacy com port card. This gave me a new com 1 & com 2 port, and disabled the old on-board port that was blown.

Another pic of the board, from inside the PC...

A pic from outside of the PC, showing the new com ports just below the ethernet card. I'm using com 2 for my RTTY interface.

Dave WB4IUY
http://www.wb4iuy.net