It never rains but it pours

[unixronin]

Bah.

The older of babylon5's mirrored 18.2GB SCSI boot disks has been throwing SMART errors warning of slow spindle start.  I have two new 18.2GB Hitachi Ultrastars here, one of which was slated to replace the third disk, which is where I was working on a Gentoo install but which got killed last year when we still didn't have the power issues here sorted out.  (The other was slated to replace the failed boot disk in llioness.)  So, I figured, OK, let's do some disk replacement.  I can swap one of these in to replace the failing boot disk, put the other in as a new Gentoo filesystem disk, and deal separately with replacing the boot disk in llioness.

So I start checking the SCSI subsystem, and it appears babylon5's last remaining¹ CDROM has also failed.  (So, it appears, has the Zip drive, but that's OK; I can't remember the last time I used it.)  I'm probably going to have all kinds of trouble finding a new SCSI CDROM drive, let alone a CD/DVD writer.  Which probably means I'm going to have to re-enable babylon5's IDE controller, something I really don't have much desire to do.

I say again, Bah.

What I may do to solve this is order an SATA DVD writer² to replace the IDE one in vorlon, and transfer the NEC IDE DVD writer from vorlon (where it has always been problematic with regard to copy protection; there's some games I've never been able to get to work with it³) to babylon5.  With just one IDE device in the machine, it shouldn't be too horrible.

[1]  At one time, babylon5 had three CDROM drives.  This was redundant most of the time, and probably excessive, but made for much faster ripping of multiple CDs, an operation which was — and remains — I/O bound, even on a fast CDROM drive.  (I can typically extract CDDA at 9x-12x, and VBR encode it using LAME at 20x-24x.)

[2]  LiteOn makes one which can be had for $30.99 from NewEgg, though it's listed as out of stock; NewEgg has another for $35.99 in stock, or a Samsung with LightScribe for $46.99 that's been very well reviewed — reviews seem to agree it's the best on the market right now — and supports EVERYTHING, but it's apparently out of stock almost everywhere too.  Bah, again.

[3]  What I want to know is, how come a $40 game usually requires that the game be able to see the physical CD present in the drive in order to run, but a $1000 office suite doesn't?  My theory is that $40 games are bought by individual users whom Microsoft and others can tell to bend over and take it, while $1000 office suites are mostly bought by large corporate customers whom the software publishers actually have to listen to when they complain.

Comments

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

My theory is that $40 games are bought by individual users whom Microsoft and others can tell to bend over and take it, while $1000 office suites are mostly bought by large corporate customers whom the software publishers actually have to listen to when they complain.

Pretty much, that's it.

I'm sure you remember the "Dongle" days. (ObBoyAmIThatOld: Went to Office* the other day. "I need a USB Dongle" "What?" "USB Dongle" "Sir, I do not know what a 'Dong-gel' is" "You know, a USB stick" "And you called it a... " "Dongle. *assume look that I'm talking to a dumbass* You've been here how long?" "I've never heard of a .. dong-gel, but Radio Shack might have one". Walk next door. Hanging up, in full view is "USB DONGLE 512MB")

Corporate IT isn't about to deal with dongles and whatnot. (I am surprised. I had expected to see USB dongles (re)emerge as they're easy to piggyback and easily worked-around).

Additionally, for a long time, Microsoft particularly ... did not discourage Office piracy. We were told at one point, that it was fine for any user of ours to also use it at home, for instance.

Sure! Go on, first hit's free!

Of course, by the time Office 2000 rolled out.. that Had Changed. :) But it still might be a holdover from the time when Office was free.

Alternatively, Microsoft may never have been able to figure out a good way *to* ensure licence terms (Word Perfect had that working in the DOS days), (as witnessed by the "activation" issues they've got - that might be the *real* reason.

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

Best buy has the Samsung SuperWriteMaster 18x Internal Double-Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Drive Model: SH-S183L/B

Another option is an IDE to SATA converter on the drive. That will at least make it so you don't have to enable IDE.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Then I'd have to put an SATA controller into babylon5.

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

OK, I got slightly confused as to which machine needed what.

[tabbifli.livejournal.com]

What I want to know is, how come a $40 game usually requires that the game be able to see the physical CD present in the drive in order to run

There's a product called Game Drive that you can pick up - there's a freeware version that has basic features and no support, and a purchase version that has more features and a year of support. Forgive my non-technical explination, but I'm not a computer geek, and I don't necessarily have the right words, but effectively what it does: When you put in a CD and the Game Drive read it, it reads the ENTIRE CD into a virtual CD ROM drive that it creates on the fly and assigns a new drive letter to. I don't recall it taking up HUGE tons of space, so it's either got a decent compression or it's sharing some of what's on the disk with the installed version of the program (which sort of makes sense). Then, when you go to play the game, you tell it to look in "Drive X", where X is (obviously) wherever the virtual CD is located. If you're switching between games, or have a CD ROM that's difficult to get to, or just don't want to keep your disks in the machine - or any number of other reasons - it's a pretty useful tool. It's also useful for CDs that can't be installed (I have three different recipe CDs that have no installation media, you can only access the info from the CD itself) or ones that travel between computers.

Anyway, it's a nifty little program. I don't currently run it, because I'm not running anything *right now* enough that it's annoying me. I think JT still has it on his Windows box, and Alex used to have it on his (he's in the same place I am WRT not needing it). If I ever get a kitchen laptop for recipies, I'll get the freeware version for the recipe CDs, and probably picture CDs as well.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There's a large number of tools like this. The one I use is called VirtualCD. As far as Windows is concerned, vorlon has 23 DVD-RW drives. Another advantage of this type of tool is that many of them can comress the CD image to save disk space, and all of them allow you to read the CD image many times faster than a real, physical CD. It's often faster to copy the CD and then installa game from the mounted image than to install it from the CD in the first place without taking the time to create an image.