[mythtv-users] laptop to ide adapters

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Sat Apr 21 23:10:29 UTC 2007


Steve Hodge wrote:
> On 4/21/07, *Rich West* <Rich.West at wesmo.com 
> <mailto:Rich.West at wesmo.com>> wrote:
>
>     One of my mythtv frontend systems was running off of a laptop
>     drive.  I
>     Obviously, this thing was cheap.. especially if it failed.  Am I
>     sure it
>     failed?  Well, two known-good laptop drives won't even spin up
>     with it.
>
>     So.. since I need a replacement to get this FE back up and
>     running, does
>     anyone have any recommendations as to where to buy this in the hopes
>     that I might actually get one that is made a bit better than this
>     one here?
>
>
> 2.5" to 3.5" adapters are purely passive - there are no electronic 
> components involved. So the only way they can fail is if there is a 
> break in a wire somewhere. Is there any obvious damage to the adapter? 
> Are you sure it's not the IDE controller or the 3.5" cable that's the 
> problem?
>
> If you do need to replace the adapter I'd recommend just getting 
> another cheap one. Around these parts they go for about US$5-10, 
> including mounting bracket. There's really not enough to them to 
> justify paying much extra for the promise of quality.

Thanks.. that is what I thought.  I had a laptop-to-ide adapter in one 
of my mythtv boxes.. the one I was using for my FC6 build (since all of 
mine _were_ FC5, this became my test box).  I pulled everything apart 
when I used it to build a new drive for my backend server (using a 3.5" 
drive), and, when I was all done, I put the machine back together with 
this adapter, only to find that the laptop drive didn't even spin up.  I 
then tried another laptop drive (known good) and it, too, wouldn't spin 
up.  This adapter is just a circuit board, really, with a laptop drive 
connector on one end, and IDE and power connectors on the other end.  
So, to agree with you, there isn't really anything special with the 
board.  It does have that hint of a smell that a burned up motherboard 
or processor gives off, but, since there are no real smarts in the 
thing, I can't see why that would be. :(

Anyhow, I'll take your advice and just grab a new one.  It's not that 
much money after all, and the laptop drive is so quiet.

I thought it would be a good chance to revisit the whole diskless 
scenario, and, while I was able to boot, it wouldn't start X, allow me 
to log in as root, or log in as mythtv.  I was able to log in as myself 
on the console (an ldap account), but none of the main services were up 
(ssh, ntp, etc).  And I couldn't /bin/su to root, either. Totally 
weird.  *shrug*

-Rich


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