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Macinjosh Takes Pliers to a B&W: Photos to Follow

Submitted by Macinjosh on September 1, 2008 - 2:11pm. PowerPC Macs

**Disclaimer: If you love the B&W/SmurfBox, you might not want to read this. At all. Ever.**

All right, so I decided this morning, hey time for the B&W to be our home file server. Administer the file server via OS X? Schweet! Bought a copy of the Hi-Cap driver so I could get all those gigs (not just 128) showing up. (Yeah I couldve bought a card. Oh well.)

I start thinking on just where I can get another hard drive into the B&W without spending another dime on it. I look through my junk screws and brackets, and whatnot here in the shed; turns out I have a few brackets that could be made to suit. I'll just put the thing above the CD-ROM, flush with it on the door side (someone just cringed, lol. Tell me if you did.)

So I do it up right: The brackets get straightened out instead of being right angle, I JB Weld them into perfect, straight position, allow for that to dry, and then decide its a bit ugly, so I cover it with black Gorilla Tape (hey, this is supposed to be functional, not pretty. It still looks better than it did.)

I go to try and test fit the door closed... guess what? Cooling isnt the only reason there's no hard drives up there, stock. I'm running head long into 2 out of the 4 memory slots and about 1/8 of an inch from being able to shut the blasted door.

At this point, I'm really upset. I KNOW the work I just put into it isnt coming off without a fight. I can think of something else that would come off without a fight, though...

... those 2 other slots. Could still have 2 x 256 ... it'll never need more than 512 in its role as a server.

So the plastics for them came off. Next, I started removing the exposed pins, in as orderly, and electrically seperated manner as possible (needle nose pliers, wish I could find my tweezers!)

Motherboard's worth what, $10/$20 on a good day?

Anyway, that's the beginning of my destructo-mod. Pics may follow unless someone with B&W love says, oh no please dont even post them.

Also curious, anyone else ever gotten this... brutal? heheh.

-- Macinjosh

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Dr. Webster's picture

How many hard drives do you h

Submitted by Dr. Webster on September 1, 2008 - 5:40pm.

How many hard drives do you have in that thing? Stock, a B&W can hold 3 drives (plus the optical), no modding required.

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Macinjosh's picture

How Many Drives?

Submitted by Macinjosh on September 1, 2008 - 6:02pm.

We may well be at 4. I didn't have the dually "bottom" bracket on hand, and also, the HiCap software says that the drives >128GB have got to be on the CD/DVD bus, even though this supposedly doesn't apply to me, as I have got the later rev IDE bus.

At some point, I have _got_ to get all this data on an HFS+ volume. The main drive in this equation, containing all the things "on the file server," is formatted NTFS, and I hate that with a passion.

Previous file server was a PII333 running Debian, command-line only version. Wanted it to be the B&W for its flexibility, its greater speed capability, its much greater ability to sleep, spin down the drives, and ((I'm hoping)) to be fired up, even if off, via the LAN.

Yes, it's a bit nuts. But I'm down with that. This is the first time I have gone this route with a system, and I can already tell you it will be the last... too much of a pain to make those slots gone, and each pin of both of them electrically isolated completely from the other.

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Macinjosh's picture

About those Pins...

Submitted by Macinjosh on September 1, 2008 - 6:07pm.

heh, didnt want someone thinking those pins are staying and im trying to isolate them all. I'm just making sure they are *totally* removed, not even so much as a nub left over. They will then be further isolated with some hot glue and a dressing to cover the war wound.

-- Macinjosh

Edit: Now that I'm much calmer and thinking rationally, I may pull the rest out properly via a soldering iron... but I shall continue, to see if we can make this work!

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Macinjosh's picture

Bad Idea

Submitted by Macinjosh on September 2, 2008 - 5:55pm.

Hey, bad idea. After I got done, all I could get out of the motherboard was the right LEDs, but no Chime of Joy.

Same deal whether RAM installed in the present slots, or not.

Basically, I acted out of anger and curiosity, and four hours sleep.

Oh, well. It got me to do up my once-again file server the right way.

-- Macinjosh

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