Headdesk - Seagate SATA drives are Windows-only crap

So, of course, after picking up a 500GB IDE drive at Fry's on Wednesday that I turned out not to need as urgently as I feared, it's $50 cheaper in today's flier.

13:14 ... and after having made plans for the damned thing, the fileserver is down again. Did I mention that this is getting tiresome? Did I mention that it only happens with recent Seagate drives? My Maxtor and Western Digital SATA drives work just fine, thank you. I see another trip to Fry's in my near future.

13:51 ... comments to this article have suggestions for the Seagate "FreeAgent" external USB drives; these probably won't work for internal SATA (I know for a fact that sdparm doesn't believe that they're SCSI drives) but I might be able to do it using an external USB enclosure. It's not a satisfactory solution, however.

14:56 ... it may be possible to turn off the offending features by running (get this) a DOS program. Fortunately it boots from a CD using a copy of FreeDOS included in the ISO.

Basically, Seagate does not support anything but Windows and wishes all other OSs would go away. The drive is, nevertheless, listed as Linux-compatible. Their FreeAgent Pro external drives, which have a FireWire port, aren't particularly well-supported for Mac, either. Apparently the only supported way to fix some problems with these drives is to plug them into a Windows machine. Feh!

I really wish my OLPC would arrive.

Headdesk[2]: Grrr

Based on the fact that a similar (bigger) drive has been running on my recording box for several days under UbuntuStudio, I'm trying a 2.6.33 kernel from backports.org. Might work. If it doesn't, Fry's is selling 500GB Maxtor SATA drives for $99 this weekend. They're a little older, so probably not SATA/300.

In case you were wondering, no, Seagate's DOS tool doesn't know how set most of the parameters on the drive. Their Windows tool does, of course. The probability that I'll be buying Seagate drives in the near future is diminishing rapidly.

OK, so much for that

All my random, scribbled-on-tiny-slips-of-paper sales "records" have been properly scribbled on large, well-ordered pieces of paper. I still need to go through and make an integrated customer list, but at this point I have enough information -- what was sold where, when and to whom -- to compute my sales taxes fairly quickly. I have a little under 2 weeks (including two whole weekends), so that's OK.

The fileserver still isn't dead, but I don't trust it yet. I'll probably upgrade to a Maxtor 500 just on general principles.

22:15 It died. There's a new disk in my immediate future. In fact, I may just start transfering to the PATA drive I bought Wednesday.

22:37 Hmm. I'm seeing write errors on the mirror drive (sdb). The easy thing to try would be disconnecting it first.