Road Trip

This came up kind of spur of the moment. My aunt (mom's sister) is coming in from out of state and will be staying at my brother's. I haven't seen her since mom's funeral.  Dad and I are driving up there to stay for the weekend.  It's going to be an early Thanksgiving celebration.  Usually I loathe the idea of getting together for a holiday cause of memories (or more specifically, the absence of mom), but my attitude has changed recently about some family things and I'm looking forward to this. :)

*Jessie hugs all her friends and then gives Alice a special long hug and tender kiss.*  I love you, my honey babe! <3 <3 <3

She Has Her Own Book!

Yesterday I went to a Goodwill store. (That's a thrift store which sells secondhand stuff.) While browsing the book section I found one I just had to buy because of the title. I've scanned the cover rather than taking a picture so it will be a better image.

 Even the white subtitle reminds me of a certain someone.

Punkin Flys with an Eagle

Punkin just happened to curl up in the perfect position for the eagle on my blanket to look like it was carrying her while flying over the mountains.

If you look at the second picture in the previous post, you can see the eagle's claw about ready to snatch her up. Lol.

Some Sight Restored

I was feeling very guilty about just assuming there was nothing that could be done for Punkin. I took her to an expensive eye specialist veterinarian today and now she can see a tiny bit. She worked her magic and then prescribed two different ointments for me to put in Punkin's eyes twice a day.

As best as the vet could determine, Punkin did not have an actual seizure but she has dry eyes and most likely she had rolled around on the floor rubbing it and irritated it even worse. This is prolly why she was crying out in pain and twitching for a little while.  The vet said she won't regain sight in her blind eye, but the ointment will make it feel better and should help her other eye to heal.

Edit: Here's a picture from moments ago of her convalescing on my make-shift bed on the living room floor.

Jessie Disappears

Hello my faithful followers.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that my income is about to increase substantially. The bad news is that requires me to work significantly more. We've already decided to start an hour earlier every morning and work both days this weekend. Since I have great trouble limiting my time online once I get on, I'm going to have to refrain from logging in.

Alice, my sweet, delectable honey, you know how I feel about what your parents did, but I can't help thinking that the universe is trying to ease your pain by taking me away for a while. We can see this as a crisis and pure torture or we can choose to use it to our advantage. Please study hard and get the best possible scores on your upcoming exams.

*Jessie bear snuggles up close with her wonderful girlfriend, kissing Alice so long and passionately that Jessie passes out from blissful exhaustion* I love you so much and I'll see you again on the 24th. <3 <3 <3

Fluffy Dog

Fluffy dog wishes Alice the best of luck for her French literature exam today.

And Jessie bear sends all her love and sweet thoughts for Alice to have a good day.

Cuddly Couple - Even Older Drawings

I was sitting here trying to think of something cute for Alice to see when she wakes up. These are prolly some of the oldest drawings I still have.  They are of a couple of my childhood stuffed animals. I named the white one Snoopy. (Prolly no surprise there since I was maybe six at the time.) The yellow one is a bean bag type and I could prolly get by with changing the name and no one would know. But I won't. I called that one Flopper. >.<

Now the most intersting thing (in my imagination) was that Flopper could fly. Snoopy would ride around on Flopper's back and they would have grand adventures. lol

So, don't laugh too hard at me. :p

And, again, good luck Alice. My best wishes and thoughts go with you as you walk into that torture chamber called The Sociology Exam. I will try to be on TC before you go to school, but I can't promise. I had a full day and I'm already quite tired.  I love you darling! <3 <3 <3

Good Luck Alice

Jessie looks at her clock and sees it's about 7:40 am on Mars. She knows her girlfriend is nearly to school now. She thinks pleasant thoughts and hopes the good vibes reach Alice so she is relaxed and ready for her French and English literature final exams.

Unlocking my ST310014ACE Completed

As my followers know, I was given a locked Seagate ST310014ACE hard drive that came from an Xbox. Because it was locked I could not FDisk or Format it or use it in any way in a computer. I found a hardware solution written by cyd0g. That diagram calls for a Max232 integrated circuit chip which I don't have and could not buy locally. In my Silly Project post I decided I could use a couple of chips from an old serial card to perform the same function as the Max232.

I drew up a diagram for a circuit which would do the same thing as cyd0g's original. You can see my progress here, here, here and here with the last one of those reporting success.

This post shows the final stages of unlocking the ST310014ACE hard drive. Here is a closeup picture of the front side of my completed circuit board. It's kind of a spaghetti mess of wires, but it did work.

And here is the back side of the board. I did a very poor job of soldering, but again, oh well, it worked.

I'm including this next picture which shows the whole set up even tho I already have it in my previous post.

In the upper left is an ATX power supply. I connected four wires from my board to the power supply to get the ground, -12 volt, +12 volt and +5 volt which I needed. On the right is my connection to the RS-232 serial cable which goes to Com Port 1 of my computer. The wires running to the hard drive are plugged into the 8 pin connector where you usually have jumpers to set the drive's configuration for master, slave or cable select. Notice that the power connector for the drive itself is not plugged in yet. This is important.

So, with the computer running, I turned on the ATX power supply and then went into the Hyper Terminal program. The first step is to name the connection. I chose "Seagate" just like cyd0g recommended. Here is the next screen which pops up. It has defaulted to "Direct to Com1" like I wanted.

After clicking "OK", it then comes up with the properties dialog box. The defaults are all ok except for the "Bits per second" which was at 2400. I changed it to 9600 per cyd0g's instructions.

After clicking "OK" for that screen the following relatively un-exciting one appears. The sweet part is in the lower left where it shows "Connected".

Now is when I plugged the power connector into the ST310014ACE hard drive and then the good part begins.

At this point I pressed Ctrl-Z to get the terminal prompt so I could type in the required commands.

Then, per cyd0g's document, I typed the following:

T>/2 (Enter)
2>S006b (Enter)
2>R21,01 (Enter)
2>C0,570 (Enter)
2>W20,01 (Enter)

And it looks like this:

I then closed Hyper Terminal, shut off the ATX power supply and disconneted the ST310014ACE hard drive. I put the jumper back on pins 5-6 to enable cable select and put the drive into another computer. I booted from a floppy disk to a DOS prompt and ran the FDisk program. Yay! I could now access the drive and I selected the "Display partition information" option. There were no partitions defined. Again, good. I then created a primary dos partition and made it active. After the required reboot, I formatted the drive and ran scandisk on it with a full surface scan. It passed these tests flawlessly with no bad sectors reported.

Although the time I spent on this far outweighs the value of the drive, I enjoyed it because I was able to design my own serial programmer circuit based on cyd0g's original and which used parts I already had. I also got experience in soldering wires to a printed circuit board and best of all, I got the satisfaction of it all working out just like I hoped it would.

*Jessie dances around with a big smile on her face.* :D

ST310014ACE Project - Step 6

I'm getting ready to solder the wires to the DB9 connector. Since the diagram for it in my Serial Programmer Circuit Diagram shows the view looking into the female side, I created another diagram showing the pin side so I don't get confused while attaching the wires. It looks like this:

That's it for now. I'm off to heat up my iron and attach some wires.

EDIT - 11:00 pm

All wires for the complete circuit are soldered in place. I hooked it to the power supply, turned it on and nothing popped, smoked or exploded. :) Now I need to connect the data cable to the drive and the serial cable to a computer and see if I can chat with the Seagate ST310014ACE hard drive. I'm tired so I'm going to save that for tomorrow.

EDIT - 12:25 am

I changed my mind about waiting. I just had to see if all this effort was worth it.

It worked!
It worked!
It worked!

Yay! I am so very happy.

I'll take some pictures and post my screenshots another time.

EDIT - 2:04 am

Ok. Here's a picture of the completed project. It's ugly. I have wires going every which way, but it worked. ;-)

Notice that the power connector is not plugged into the hard drive. There is a reason for that. I'll explain when I post some more.

Unlocking a ST310014ACE - Step 5

I got each end of the CD audio cable plugs trimmed and I banded them together with a couple of my hair thingies. It plugs in nicely to the hard drive port.

Then I cut the wire in the middle and found out that only two wires are inside besides the stranded ground wires. I was hoping that all four wires which I can see going into the connectors would be there. So, I'll have to splice onto the black wires up by the plug. Grrr.

I then worked on de-soldering the chips from the old serial card and that was a dismal failure. I finally had to cut the chips out and then cut the board between each pair of pins. (I inserted a metal blade between the board and the chip so the saw couldn't cut into the IC.) This let me heat the solder and pry up one side at a time. The next picture shows the cuts I've made and I took another picture with it upside down to better show the chip itself.

And finally, I have one of the chips off and soldered onto the new board. I did break the fine part of pin 7, so I soldered a copper wire to it and since that is a ground pin, I ran it to two more places for later use when I solder the audio cable wires to the board to use as the connection to the hard drive.

I've already cut the board for the second chip. (That's the one in the pictures above.) So I'm ready to de-solder the second chip.  I know it will go fine cause I've got experience now. :)

EDIT (5:31 pm)

It's much later in the day and here's a picture showing where I have removed three of the partial pieces of the printed circuit board from the other IC.

In the next picture, there is just one little piece left.

Yay! All the little pieces of circuit board are off of the second chip.

After straightening the pins, I've inserted the chip into the new board. This picture shows the board right side up with the '88 chip on the left and the '89A on the right to match my circuit layout drawing. Since I've angled the board you can see the copper wire I added to the ground pin of the line receivers chip.

Then I went back to the data cable and cut loose the black wires.

I spliced on some new wire to each of the black wires and soldered them to make a good connection.

Here we see that I've used electrical tape to wrap up the exposed wires. (I taped each splice separately, then each 4 wire set.) I also taped a piece of blue paper on top to indicate which side is up.

And here is the data cable plugged into the communications port of the hard drive.

On the other end of this cable I've stripped back the insulation getting ready to solder each wire to where it needs to go on the circuit board.

I'll need to solder the two data and one ground wire to the DB9 connector and tie the appropriate pins together. For now I have more chores to take care of and I hope to work on this again later on.

ST310014ACE Project - Step 4

Well, ok. It seems there is going to be more than four steps to this project. For this stage I've managed to get the pins out of the power hood thingy.

To my dismay they are too large to plug into the holes in the ATX power connector and the gauge of wire is too big to poke thru the holes in the printed circuit board I bought for the ICs. So, I pried open the metal pins and then cut down 1/3 of it to make a pin small enough to fit into the ATX holes. For the other end of the wires, I split them in half and twisted them separately so I will just poke them thru two holes on the board instead of one.

I then moved on to the CD audio cable and I need to cut the clip thingy off of the one side since it would be in the way when I go to plug it into the communications port of the Seagate ST310014ACE hard drive.

And the same for the little tabs on the other side. I need to cut them off as well.

Between preparing these wires and other chores this morning I've made progress but not nearly as much as I would have liked. It's a little after 1 in the afternoon and I think I'll have some breakfast and take a nap.

Unlocking a Seagate ST310014ACE Hard Drive - Step 3

I've completed the next step in my quest of unlocking a Seagate ST310014ACE hard drive and that is gathering of all the parts I need.  As you may recall from my Silly Project post, I have an old PII-108 RS-232 serial card which has the integrated circuit chips I plan to use in my Serial Programmer Circuit Design. This picture shows the GD75188 and GD75189A chips on that board:

I went to Radio Shack and picked up items 276-159, 276-1538 and 276-1539 today. Here's a picture of them:

For the connection to the ATX power supply, I'm planning to use the pass-thru part of a case fan connector. I think I can use my needle-nosed tweezers and pinch the pins so I can slide each wire out of the connector hood.  That will let me plug each one into the appropriate hole in the ATX connector.  The next picture shows that and an audio cable. It's the one that goes from a sound card to a CD or DVD drive for playing music CDs. I will cut the wire midway and that will give me two 4 pin connectors to plug into the Xbox's hard drive communication port.

Step 4 will be to de-solder the two IC chips from the old board and then build the circuit I've designed.  (Remember, it's based on cyd0g's original design and I've merely created an alternate version using different parts.) I'll let you know how that goes when I get there.

Xbox ST310014ACE Unlocker - Serial Programmer Circuit Design

My silly project continues. I call it that because of the extraordinary amount of time I'm spending on it just to unlock an Xbox Seagate ST310014ACE 10 gig hard drive.  This was one of about a dozen drives given to me which either had problems or were too small to be of practical use in a modern computer.  Well, for those who know me, I don't have any modern computers and this size would be quite nice for me.

During my search for a solution, I found the following information at Llamma.Com: "The Xbox uses a hard drive password locking mechanism, each password is unique, if you do not know the password you cannot even format a locked drive by normal means. The motherboard that hard drive came with knows the password but if the board is no longer available a hardware/software means of forcing the drive to unlock is necessary to make the drive useful again."

Later on that page is a link to Unlocking Tutorial Seagate ST310014ACE v0.1 by cyd0g which provides a diagram for building a serial programmer circuit to access the drive and instructions for chatting with the drive via Hyperterminal. I really, really want to try that but the main ingredient in cyd0g's recipe is a Max232 integrated circuit chip which I don't have and cannot obtain locally. Further research on my part seems to indicate that the MC 1488 and MC 1489 chips have similar line drivers and receivers respectively. They are functionally equivalent to the GD75188 and GD75189A chips which can be found on many old RS-232 (serial) cards and I happen to have more than one of those cards.

Here then is step two of my silly project in which I've laid out the circuit design that I think will do the same thing as cyd0g's original:

If you happen to be reading this and are actually interested in my design, be sure to right-click the image and select "Save Picture As..." so you can have a copy for later reference. Also, anyone who wishes to host this image on their site may do so as long as it is in unaltered form. Be sure to include a reference link to cyd0g's tutorial because it has the instructions for how to use the serial programmer circuit.

Additionally, do note that I've not built and tested it yet but will be doing so in the future.

EDIT - 10/08/2011 @ 01:47 am.

I've now built and tested the circut, see this post. And the one after it when I get around to writing it.

Silly Project

I'm not ready to post the details of my project, but I've spent about 14 to 16 hours over the past couple of days doing research for it. I've embedded a few links you can browse if you are really bored (or into techie things). The project calls for a Max232 integrated circuit chip. I don't have one of those and the local Radio Shack doesn't carry them. However, I dug way deep into my old parts collection and found this:

(I googled the above picture. I'll take one of my own card when I am ready to post the complete details of my project.)

Anyhow, this card happens to have a GD75188 and a GD75189A on it. If I'm understanding this stuff right, where I need to use pins 7 & 10 of the Max232 chip, I can use pins 2 & 3 of the GD75188 for my line driver and where it needs pins 8 & 9 of the Max232, I can use pins 1 & 3 of the GD75189A for my line receiver. I will have to supply +12 volt and -12 volt to the '88 chip rather than only the +5 volt the Max232 uses. No big deal there because I'm planning to use an old computer power supply to get my juice. I've already tested the PSU by shorting the PS_ON pin to ground so I can turn it on without having to plug it into a motherboard.

Do keep in mind that the power supply should not be run this way unless you have a load on it.  Meaning a device that is using some of the power it is producing. I connected a hard drive (which has 1.23 meg in bad sectors and which I don't trust for data).

I'll make a new blog entry when I get more accomplished or finish building the circuitry.