Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

I didn't count....but I'm guessing about ~30 rivets just got drilled out....







Widened out the power button hole.....pic is blurry, I guess the camera was focusing on the background...



The reason, I didn't like the original power button, it was a flimsy microswitch....and I had plenty of clearance, it won't interfere with the door....I already checked...so enter in an aviation-grade momentary. These are engine starter switches from a larger twin piston engine aircraft (cessna 414/421).



The system never had a reset....it does now.



Next will be corrosion removal & paint prep.







Until later...

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

...and let the fun begin!!

Case internals stripped out.





The drive rails appear to be some primitive Enlight. I have 3 sets that came with it. I have some Antec solo rails that will fit if I need more.



Rusty bottom & case floor....looks like it probably was sitting in a leaky basement or maybe a dirt floor barn....no telling over the last 22 years.





Very little yellowing on the front, that is with the flash on. It won't need the bromine offgassing soup, just a good cleaning.



Now time to remove the top/side panel.







Butt shot...



Feet, fans, and other random hardware....



Now for the first mod.... The IO plate area was ~1/16th" narrow along the top edge, and the corners were rounded. No way the IO shield would fit. The original was a screw-in that fit internally....so the rear opening size didn't matter if using that....but this is me...

This was too thin of a margin for the big tools....I had to carve it down with a rough file and squared out the corners....and shazam! Fits now and everything lines up internally and externally.



The next step is drilling out rivets; further disassembling the case.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

Poked through all the found TIF's.... Apparently this machine was owned by a printing/advertising company....nothing but a lot of templates for perhaps business cards, flyers, and stuff like that...nothing exciting and no naked ladies.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

Sure do. As long as GPU prices stay obscene, I'm still winning!

As soon as they're not, I'm dead meat...

You'll keep your title for quite a while it seems....prices are still batshit crazy and going strong!

FWIW, lumber has been coming down a bit lately!

[ratdude747]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

I've got a plan floating around in my head for this.... RD probably has an idea of the core hardware....but that's only part of this build.... Envision very 90's looking on the outside, but internally a bit more modern in more ways than just the core hardware. This will require a full disassembly of the case, every pop rivet drilled out and some serious resto work done.... This case is definitely deserving of something a bit more unusual...

Sure do. As long as GPU prices stay obscene, I'm still winning!

As soon as they're not, I'm dead meat...

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

I've got a plan floating around in my head for this.... RD probably has an idea of the core hardware....but that's only part of this build.... Envision very 90's looking on the outside, but internally a bit more modern in more ways than just the core hardware. This will require a full disassembly of the case, every pop rivet drilled out and some serious resto work done.... This case is definitely deserving of something a bit more unusual...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

No, I said DC. Goes through a bridge rectifier on that main board then DC feeds regulators on the second. Its input read 107VDC.

I don't know, but at least it there's something going to the bridge rectifier.

I guess I was thinking AC, because of the input before the bridge rectifier, out of a habit, whoops!

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

107 VAC? That looks very low, if that's not a custom voltage by Delta.

No, I said DC. Goes through a bridge rectifier on that main board then DC feeds regulators on the second. Its input read 107VDC.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

107 VAC? That looks very low, if that's not a custom voltage by Delta.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

I had to move this off my bench to work on other things....but poking around the 36gb array, I did find a folder with 11gb worth of TIF's in it. NT doesn't know what to do with them, so I didn't get to see what they are....I'll dump them off when I get some work done and find out.

[ratdude747]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

Glad you're enjoying...

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

Many power supplies have written text on the PCB showing what the wires are for, did you check for that?

That would have been too easy.... Nothing of the sort on this one.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

There is no voltages present on any of the PSU output pins.... Nothing was jumping out at me as being faulty. Logic tells me that the green wires in the smaller ATX connector would/should have a +5v STBY voltage, as that's the color code for this voltage on a normal ATX PSU, however there's nothing present.

Many power supplies have written text on the PCB showing what the wires are for, did you check for that?

[eccerr0r]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

the BX board I have does not like "AMD" 256M or 512M SDRAMs that I've started to collect... so they get dumped into 3-slot VIA S370 board, alas this is only 1.5G. Would be nice to put all my 512M SDRAMs into the 4-slot 440BX board. *sigh*

BTW Linux had a cow when I had a P2-233 and a Celeron-500 in this BX board. It booted but lots of stuff failed spectacularly.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

see if there is anything juicy scans that were stored. For all you know this might have stored SSN's or belonged to a porn publishing business

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

wish there was an easy way to shoehorn in extra refresh lines so my 440BX dual slot-1 could deal with 512M SDRAMs...

The P6DGU is a GX chipset (there's a P6DBU that's a BX); which supports 2gb RAM....but is otherwise the same as the BX....it was intended for the P2/P3 Xeon, but Supermicro was being rebellious and built a model that would run the normal P2/P3's.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

wish there was an easy way to shoehorn in extra refresh lines so my 440BX dual slot-1 could deal with 512M SDRAMs...

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

I'm still not 100% sure the motherboard is bad. The power supply powers up, has voltage in the primary (AT side is fed by DC voltage from the ATX side; read 107vdc)...but information on this PSU (Delta DPS-280bb Rev 2) is pretty much nill; such as pinouts, standby voltages, schematics, etc..... I have no idea what triggers it, it may be the issue, not the motherboard. I fired the board with an AT power supply, it did power up but did not POST, which is what led me to conclude the board was bad....but that may not be correct.

Here's a few pics of the PSU inside:







There is no voltages present on any of the PSU output pins.... Nothing was jumping out at me as being faulty. Logic tells me that the green wires in the smaller ATX connector would/should have a +5v STBY voltage, as that's the color code for this voltage on a normal ATX PSU, however there's nothing present. Yes, I did try it with a good CMOS battery in it; there were some systems from the days of yore that the CMOS battery provided the startup voltage until the PSU fired off and took over....but it wasn't the case here...so odds are this PSU is the issue and the board is good....

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

ah it's not raid, at least hardware. You could probably just hook it up and see the data. Might be something interesting on there

More fun to boot from it, and here we go!

The original board on the left and a Supermicro P6DGU on the right....nearly identical core hardware.



These boards have the same mount points are are the same size.



The weird proprietary PSU removed.



A freshly recapped PSU that a local shop gave me...





Dropped the board in.





This is a good start!



All the drives showed up.



...and here goes NT4 SP6



Well fudge....password.



I rebooted it off another media and cleared the password. Of course a plethora of errors & unreachable network drive paths.



Reconfig'd everything. The old motherboard has an onboard NIC, this one doesn't....so I added one.



A few reboots later.....no more errors, in true color, and LAN working.



...and like Al Capone's vault, there really wasn't anything to see. This thing was apparently a scan/print server. All data that it handled was stored on one of the network drives, there's nothing really on this machine except the software for some old world legacy scanner.



So I tossed FF2.0.0.2 on it and yay, BCN!



The upside, all the drives were checked & verified good, 2x 18gb and 1x 9gb. The 2x 18gb HDD's are in some kind of software RAID, NT shows it as a 36gb volume in disk manager; as a stripe array. Not sure how that was accomplished; as the controller doesn't support any kind of RAID functions whatsoever....so if NT4 supported soft RAID's, I never knew that....so I suppose I did learn something.

I still haven't solidified what I'll do with this thing.....but this case is screaming out to be a mega sleeper system!

[Uranium-235]

Re: Topcat's Acer Dual Slot 1 Server? - The Acer Altos 1100

All this stuff is really making me want to whip out my P2B and make a nice build out of it.

careful about whipping anything out here