So, after my first approach that failed (netbooting the Ultra5 so that it used the 160GB SATA disk), my second one failed too (using the 8.4GB as primary disk and then leave the 160 as extension).
This time the reason for the failure is mechanical, there’s no way I can put both disk on that box: the 8.4GB has the holes for the screws not aligned well enough for the floppy bay to be used, while the 160GB does not even fit the bay (too tall).
Also, mkennedy told me that the problem I hit most likely is a limit in Ultra5’s controller that does not go over 40GB addressing in IDE, which means the 80GB drive might still be alive, I just cannot use it properly (although I’m not entirely sure if the disk is not at fault, smartmontools’ logs shown that there were bad sectors already on that disk).
Unfortunately, all the usual stores I buy at carry only 80GB or bigger EIDE harddrives, so I cannot buy a new 40GB one (my only 40GB one is in Farragut, and I won’t replace it with the unreliable 80GB one). Weeve told me the other day that Gustavoz boots out of a compact flash memory, using an IDE CF drive, so I tried looking for that.. the result is not good, as I cannot find a single store in Italy carrying a version of it that’s not supposed to be used for embedded systems (like, having a PCI or 3”½ form factor, so that I can put it on the Ultra5, the only ones I found have two or four screws to be connected to the embedded chassis).
This starts to be a problem, even if I found it for something like €17, add other €17 for a 256MB compact flash (just to carry /boot, probably lower could work too, but I’m not totally sure, a single kernel in x86 takes up to 50MB, and the Ultra5 is supposedly a kernel debug box), I’ll end up spending more to boot the Ultra5, than I paid the whole box, and I don’t really have much money to spend around lately, as I wish to save as much as I can as I’m going to buy a new laptop soon, with a loan (hoping this is the correct English term), but still it’s quite a bit of money that I’m going to spend on the long run.
Okay better if I go relax myself with The Firm again, maybe I can come up with a decent solution tomorrow.
