[geeks] HP announces EOL for AlphaServer systems

[Bill Bradford]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 10:46:30PM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> > Unfortunately the Maxtor 40G drive out of my DirecTiVo was two weeks
> > out of warranty when it finally died. 8-(
> So they've cut the warranty down to 4 hours now? ;)

bahahaha.  No, this DTiVo (a Hughes HDVR2) was reading/writing to the
HD (at times, multiple screams) 24/7/365 for .. two and a half years
before it finally started flaking.  Rather than just have DirecTV 
replace it with a R10 (unhackable) unit I decided to do things myself.

I yanked it out, replaced it with a bigger Maxtor, reinstalled using
the instantcake[0] and PTVNet[1] images, and hack/network-enabled the 
box at the same time.

That entire hour and a half of effort resulted in a 190-hour DirecTiVo
with network connectivity, a web server for managing/scheduling 
recordings[2], and the ability to dump shows to my Mac as MPEG-2.[3]

After all that, I let SpinRite do a full surface-scan-and-repair of the
old 40G HD, and it's supposedly "fixed" (just a few bad blocks).  I've
not run OnTrack against it yet to see what *that* says.

The last time I lost critical data due to a HD failure was in '98, when
a 9G Micropolis (SCSI) in a Pentium Pro machine of mine died after the
power blinked.

Bill

[0] http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/instantcake/
[1] http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/ptvnetCD/
[2] http://tivowebplus.sourceforge.net
[3] http://www.tivotool.com

-- 
Bill Bradford 
Houston, Texas