General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

IGORA needs more memory but sysinfo shows no GTIA issues.

I just took a look at M.U.L.E. as you suggested. Yeah, nice intro. I have no idea how to play it though. :-)

[rubber_jonnie]

IGORA needs more memory but sysinfo shows no GTIA issues.

I just took a look at M.U.L.E. as you suggested. Yeah, nice intro. I have no idea how to play it though. :-)

The manual is here: M.U.L.E instructions

Once you get the hang of it, it's an easy game to play. Get land, decide on a use for the land, so food, energy and smithore. There is a level with crystite but I generally don't play that.

Then equip your M.U.L.E accordingly and put it on your land. You can over the period have different types on different plots, but plots next to each other that you own with the same type work better.

Sell your excess for a profit and try to have the most land, goods and cash at the end.

It's a great game once you get into it.

Ahh I forgot IGORA needs more than 64K, sorry.

[stephen_usher]

Bother! Bother! Bother! Bother!

I just upgraded the HDDriver on my TT to the latest version and had a look at HDDRUTIL, clicked upon "Repair Partitions" and it emptied the partition table!!!!!

That's all my stuff gone!

P.S. No it hasn't... I do have a copy of the SD card, but that was before I installed BSD... and it has some minor partition issues.

[stephen_usher]

Bother! Looks like SD2SCSI V6 stores its settings at the end of the card, so I need a 16GB card, the same size as the original. On an 8GB card it doesn't see any of the virtual drives.

Hello Amazon!

[stephen_usher]

Well, I have the partition start and end values...

But....

In HDDRUTIL Edit Partitions doesn't allow me to add partitions back.
If I were to "Partition" the drive I would need the sizes, not the start/end locations and that part of the utility automatically blanks the start of the partitions anyway. So, I'm a bit stuck.

Once I have access to the HDDriver forum I can ask how to recover, if it's even possible.

[exxos]

Have you tried diamond edge on it?

[stephen_usher]

Reading up on what the new software does I’m guessing that it’s replaced the TOS partition table with an empty GPT partition table, so unrecoverable.

It’s flippin’ dangerous and should be greyed out if the drive doesn’t have a GPT partition table.

[stephen_usher]

It looks like I tickled a bug that's been in HDDRUTIL since 2011.

The good news is that it's just emptied the partition data. If I can find out how many bytes this is I can easily copy the partition data from my back-up image from a couple of weeks ago and recover.

[stephen_usher]

Up and running again!

Uwe said that it's just the first sector changed, so a quick dd(1) of the first 512 bytes from the back-up to the live card fixed it.

Phew!

[stephen_usher]

Well, after that "fun", down to checking old machines I've not powered on for a few years.

I got the BBC Master and BBC B+ 128K down from the loft. I especially wanted to check the AA batteries in the NVRAM back-up module as I couldn't remember if I used Duracell or not. I also wanted to check the B+ 128K as that has a habit of Hitachi lower (4164) RAM chips failing when in storage, two have done so so far and had to be replaced.

Well, the Master's batteries are fine. They're Energizer and have a shelf life until December 2029. I obviously replaced them in 2022 (Energizer batteries have a 7 year shelf life) but I can't remember doing so.

I powered the machine up and... tick-tick-tick. The power supply kept resetting. Supposedly this PSU was recapped before I got the machine so a bit surprising. Though the RIFA had been replaced like-for-like unfortunately.

Anyway, on with the 'scope. The +5V line was getting up to 5V and immediately crashing down to 1V and then dissipating. When I turned the PSU off there was a brief burst of constant 5V. This sort of suggests a high voltage side problem, but disconnecting the +5V from the motherboard allowed the PSU to work. It continued to work if one of the MB connectors was connected. It almost and then did work with two connected and then all three. I'm guessing that a capacitor needed to reform somewhere. It reliably turns on now.

I may think about re-capping the PSU again with known good caps and swapping the RIFA with a poly X2 cap whilst I'm at it.