I recently acquired a Silicon Graphics Crimson Elan workstation. It contained this beast, a Seagate ST41200N. It’s a 1.2GB SCSI II hard disk. The Crimson itself is dated from 1992 from its labels, so I imagine the disk is from about the same time. It’s a full height 5.25″ drive.
I’m familiar with large old disks from the past such as the Quantum Bigfoot, but they are veritably tiny compared to this huge thing!
Compared to a 3.5″ 10GB Maxtor IDE disk from the early 2000s, and a 2.5″ 100GB Western Digital SATA disk from the late 2000s :)
The blue wires soldered on is a nice touch.
I’ll post more pictures of the Crimson later.
I was running Ubuntu 7.10 on my server, but wanted to reinstall it with Debian etch. The machine in question doesn’t have a CD/DVD-ROM drive, and I couldn’t be bothered to set up a tftp server on my laptop so I could netboot it. The answer? Set up the existing grub to boot the network installer kernel and initrd (initial RAM disk).
The files you need are here and here. (You’ll need some different files if you don’t want the x86 version, that is left as an excercise for the reader)
Just stick them into your /boot/, configure /boot/grub/menu.lst with something like this:
title Debian etch installer
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/linux vga=normal
initrd /boot/initrd.gz
Since the initrd contains everything you need including the installer and network driver modules, and only gets read once (when booting), you can of course overwrite the partition that these files are stored on (though if you mess up the installation it’ll be a bit harder to get it re-started ;)