155 replies to this topic

[DarkLord]

doctorclu, on Sun Aug 28, 2011 7:57 AM, said:

Reporting in, unable to reach Boot Factory or Dark Forces. (both through Prison Board BBS and direct)

Was able to get on Thunderdome, Electric Cafe, and the Grove.

Series of storms last couple of days, power outages, and I am
working all weekend, so was unable to reset promptly each time,
as is my norm.

Back online now though...

[bf2k+]

Boot Factory 2k+ down - no power here since Saturday!!


Ouch!

[player 0ne]

hey darklord. man i still havent made it to your bbs. i gotta figure out if my router is blocking it.

looking forward to registering..

[DarkLord]

bf2k+, on Wed Aug 31, 2011 5:09 PM, said:

Boot Factory 2k+ down - no power here since Saturday!!


Ouch!

Ouch indeed, sorry to hear that! Irene?

[DarkLord]

player 0ne, on Wed Aug 31, 2011 5:57 PM, said:

hey darklord. man i still havent made it to your bbs. i gotta figure out if my router is blocking it.

looking forward to registering..

That's really just odd. We probably had 50+ calls this month.

You are hitting <return> or <enter> when it first connects, right?
On some systems you get a blank screen and have to hit your keys
a few times...

[bf2k+]

DarkLord, on Wed Aug 31, 2011 8:41 PM, said:

bf2k+, on Wed Aug 31, 2011 5:09 PM, said:

Boot Factory 2k+ down - no power here since Saturday!!


Ouch!

Ouch indeed, sorry to hear that! Irene?

Yes Irene (that bitch!)

Power came back on last night but still no internet or cable TV so the BBS is up and running but you cannot get to it thru the internet... (YET!)

[doctorclu]

bf2k+, on Fri Sep 2, 2011 3:39 PM, said:

Yes Irene (that bitch!)

Power came back on last night but still no internet or cable TV so the BBS is up and running but you cannot get to it thru the internet... (YET!)

LOL! Loved the comment about Irene. So anyway, hope everything is going alright with you otherwise.

[DarkLord]

doctorclu, on Fri Sep 2, 2011 3:56 PM, said:

bf2k+, on Fri Sep 2, 2011 3:39 PM, said:

Yes Irene (that bitch!)

Power came back on last night but still no internet or cable TV so the BBS is up and running but you cannot get to it thru the internet... (YET!)

LOL! Loved the comment about Irene. So anyway, hope everything is going alright with you otherwise.

2nd'ed ! That was actually pretty funny.

I'll echo what Doc says and hope you're back online soon.

[doctorclu]

Until the Boot Factory comes back up, here are some cool BBS pictures, one of which was a Atari BBS and possibly another.

http://bbsmates.com/...m.aspx?id=12593
For sure a Atari BBS

http://bbsmates.com/...m.aspx?id=12594

A cool blast from the past...

[bf2k+]

Internet back up! BBS back online!

[PageVGP]

Yes! Got on to Darkforce today! Oh its been so long and so nice to see the proper internet again... Next up is getting my 400 online and logged on!

[DarkLord]

PageVGP, on Sat Sep 17, 2011 10:07 AM, said:

Yes! Got on to Darkforce today! Oh its been so long and so nice to see the proper internet again... Next up is getting my 400 online and logged on!

Glad to see everything is back to normal.

[Mad Hatter]

Wish there were as many TI-99 BBSes as there are Atari. Alas there are only two.. one dial-up only, and one telnet only.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

Since 2 hours Thunderdome BBS is dead. The harddisk crashed at the same day I finished a PC set-up to do the backups. In other words, there are no backups.

The HD won't spin up anymore. Doesn't look like something that can be fixed.

[bf2k+]

Fox-1 / mnx, on Sun Sep 18, 2011 4:27 PM, said:

Since 2 hours Thunderdome BBS is dead. The harddisk crashed at the same day I finished a PC set-up to do the backups. In other words, there are no backups.

The HD won't spin up anymore. Doesn't look like something that can be fixed.

Ouch! Sorry to hear that...

[Stephen]

Fox-1 / mnx, on Sun Sep 18, 2011 4:27 PM, said:

Since 2 hours Thunderdome BBS is dead. The harddisk crashed at the same day I finished a PC set-up to do the backups. In other words, there are no backups.

The HD won't spin up anymore. Doesn't look like something that can be fixed.

Shit - sorry to hear that.

[svenski]

Fox-1 / mnx, on Sun Sep 18, 2011 4:27 PM, said:

Since 2 hours Thunderdome BBS is dead. The harddisk crashed at the same day I finished a PC set-up to do the backups. In other words, there are no backups.

The HD won't spin up anymore. Doesn't look like something that can be fixed.

Sorry to hear that Fox, crossing fingers that something might be salvaged.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

At the meanwhile the HD is cooled down to ambient temp but still no go. However I think it's not a mechanical problem I'm going to try the freezer trick. It worked once before.

[DarkLord]

Hope it works - we're all pulling for ya.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

Thunderdome update:

Freezing the HD didn't work out. Well, the freezing itself worked perfectly but it didn't change a thing. At the meanwhile, however, there is some progress.

I started to disassemble the harddisk because I knew I had another harddisk laying around which crashed years ago (same symptom, stopped turning) and that one was also an Imprimis and had the same size. It seemed to be another revision but I ripped the main PCB from that one and put it on the BBS harddisk. To my surprise the drive starts spinning and was even going to boot the BBS!

I already had connected an SD card device to the SCSI chain to immediately start a back-up, just in case.

I started with a back-up of the boot partition using "HardBack" and there seem to be a lot of errors on that partition but halfway "HardBack" backed out the hard way (hence the name? :-)) and corrupted my destination partition!

Just started a new back-up, using "FlashBack" this time. I hope this will do better. I also hope that this back-up tool creates a list of what the problem files were otherwise I'll get a very hard time to recover it. Already tried to run "cleanup" to get at least a list of the problem files but it also backs out halfway.

For the Thunderdome users: If I ever get to the point that the BBS will run again, keep in mind that your stats may be wrong. The regular userlog is corrupt but a long time ago I made a batch file to back it up to another partition once a week. I hope I never disabled that feature! another thing is, I don't know yet if the partition on where the back-up is is recoverable. I don't even know on what partition it actually is saved to right now!

Another very annoying thing is that I need to press "start" every time FlashBack comes across a corrupt file. This is not funny! FlashBack is running now for an hour or so and I still have 1219 files left. And that's just the first 16MB partition of the 11 to do! Not even talking about the other non-BBS partitions on that harddisk!

Wish me luck...


Sysop Fox-1

note: with the fact I got 1 working HD using the parts of 2 maybe means I can repair the other one too! If it works I finally have access to my old sources from years ago (for what it's worth, don't even know exactly what those were :-))


edit: I'm an ASS! No wonder the back-up tools back out! How can one put 16MB partitions to an 8MB SD-Card! (how did I ever get that thing in the first place?)

edit 2: Suddenly I can't partition 4GB SD Cards anymore, while it worked before. Anyways, switched to a 4GB FlashCard which seems to work.

Edited by Fox-1 / mnx, Wed Sep 21, 2011 6:46 PM.

[DarkLord]

Yay! Go team...

[Fox-1 / mnx]

I think this is gonna be a loooong week. A little more automation would be welcome now :-)

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[DarkLord]

Ouch.

Makes me glad I've got my BBS setup where I backup everything to CDRW. I do semi-regular
backups every couple of months or so (or anytime I change anything). I've got a stack of backups
dating back years and years...

Hope you get through this soon.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

If I only could get a CDRW working on my BlackBox :-)

Full back-ups were a pain in the a** as they went thru SIO (AspeQt). This takes way too long. Now I use SCSI SD/MMC/MS/CF card readers/writers which makes things easier. Too bad the HD went bad before I set those up. Another bad thing is that my 4GB SDcards won't work anymore when used with a PCMCIA->SD-card adapter. This is very strange since I made a 16MB test partition with games on one of them and it did work! Must be something with the 4GB size. Time to get some 2GB ones.

At the meanwhile I found a trick to speed things up a little bit. While using FlashBack, at every bad file it stops and shows "Abort or Start to continue". With the BlackBox monitor I can edit RAM on the fly so when changing EOR $06 to EOR $07 it will continue when start is NOT pressed :-)

I also think I'll have to hurry up because the HD goes worse by the minute. I already reached the point where the config sectors are inaccessible so I'll have to manually type all controller/sector-info/etc. in the case I press reset.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

Back in business.

After some sleepless nights the BBS is up and running again. The userlog has been restored by combining the corrupted original with a corrupted (1 day old) back-up so nothing is lost in this part and it's up to date.

It now runs from a 4GB Flash Memory Card using a SCM PCD-50b card reader with modified firmware to make it a reader AND writer. Runs fine when connected to a slightly modified Black Box. A secondary SD card will be added as soon as I found a solution to easily make back-ups of all Black Box data (complete partitions, partition tables and configuration data).

If you notice anything weird (apart from the regular weirdness), leave me a detailed feedback on there.

More info on Thunderdome BBS.