Game Console Hard Drives

Back in 2005, I bought an Xbox 360 that had a 20GB hard disk.  A few years after purchase, I bought a refurbished 120GB drive from Microcenter.com for $90...it was a nice upgrade.  I swapped out the little drive for the bigger one and continued to play my games (putting the 20GB drive in my parts bin...I never throw anything away when it comes to computer parts).

Later, the Xbox 360 experienced the Red Ring of Death (RRD).  I took it apart with the idea that maybe the CPU needed new thermal paste.  It did, as the old paste was pretty much done.  I removed the old and put on some new paste, but this didn't solve the issue.  I think by the time it experienced the RRD, the CPU was cooked.  So I bought a new hard drive.

I transferred my data from the old drive to the new drive and put the 120GB into the parts bin.

Around the RRD issue, the PS3 also died.  It was an original PS3 (80GB drive version).  The Blu-Ray stopped reading, which meant that I couldn't play any games, since it couldn't read disks.  We put the system to the side and bought a new one.  Well, maybe 2 months ago, I decided to trash the system (removed the drive for privacy reasons).  I've decided to keep the drive.

So, I've three (3) hard drives from 3 different gaming systems.  The 20GB is probably next to useless, but I'll  probably end up using it somewhere (somehow).  I might be able to use the 160GB drive (a WD unit) in my Macbook, since it only has an 80GB drive and I keep maxing it out.  Or, I can use it as a backup drive instead.  Same with the 80GB Seagate that was in the PS3.

Now, did you see what I just stated?  Did you notice that I stated in the first paragraph that the Xbox 360 had a 120GB drive and in the paragraph above, I stated that it was a 160GB drive?  Well, surprise.  I opened the HDD case, which was labeled "120GB HDD", and found that the drive is actually 160GB in size!  It has model WD16000BEVT on the label, and a big "160GB" in bold.

I just need to find out which cabling I need to turn these into external drives, which means I'll need some external HDD cases, as well.

I love my toys.  :)

Main Slackbox (named slackbox) back online

I finally had time to figure out what was going on with my Slackware tower. It has been down for so long I forget when it actually started having issues. I believe it began having problems since the beginning of 2009.

The culprit? Either the SATA drive that I installed in it awhile back or the SATA controllers on teh board. It's difficult to tell without swapping the SATA drive out for another. I just disabled it (the drive) for now. It works fine without it connected...that tells me its the drive and not the controller.

I began by trying to boot it up by using a Ubuntu LiveCD. It wouldn't boot up and showed many ATA-based errors in the logs. I tried a different Ubuntu LiveCD (v8.10, I believe)...still, same issue.

It was then that I started focusing on the SATA drive. I just unplugged it and tried to reboot...got a reboot and the system has been running for about a week without any issues.

So, I lost a drive. It's not a big deal, as that drive was hosting Windows, I believe. Weird, because that drive is rather young. I believe its a WD (I have seriously bad luck with that brand). I can do without replacing that drive for now, though.

Slamd64

I've installed Slamd64 on my new AMD system. Initially, I had SATA issues that have mysteriously disappeared (no idea why, other than maybe swapping out that SATA cables helped). I installed using Disk 1 only (I didn't download anything else), which has the core system components. I then wanted to boot X, which required me downloading the X and KDE software. In fact, I went ahead and copied a whole mirror site and will continue to rsync the site against my local copy, using the updated local mirror as a upgrade repository.

I had issues getting my mouse recognized. I've a Logitech MX1000 wireless mouse, which is connected to a KVM. Slamd64 detects it as a PS/2 mouse. Slamd64 has PS/2 mice blacklisted, so I had to unblock the psmouse module from /etc/modules.d/blacklist (by uncommenting the module entry). Then I loaded the module and rebooted. The reboot detected the mouse. It took me a while to find this tidbit of info (although, it was recorded on the Slamd64 forums). I'll be adding this to my local knowledgbase (in fact, I need to add a whole Slamd64 category first).

I've also installed phpsysinfo on this machine, so I can see the hardware and how it is detected by this tool. From what I've seen so far, the second CPU core takes the brunt of the load, with the first CPU core assisting when the second is maxed out...I don't know if this is normal or a software issue (maybe phpsysinfo needs to be optimized for dual core usage?), but I only tested this by refreshing the phpsysinfo browser session (it appears to put a quick load on the system...dunno if that's normal or not).

Anyways, if things go well with this distro, I'll be using this machine as my main Linux machine, eventually.