Technical curse

Someone must have put a technical curse on me. Everything technical I’ve had a hand in for the past several days hasn’t worked. **Episode one: the fax server** 

At work, I’m trying to get another few fax modems hooked up to our FreeBSD based HylaFax server. This requires the installation of a couple more serial ports. No worries, I happen to have a spare PCI card with two serial ports on it. After 6 hours of futzing around, I learn that the SUNxxxx chip used on the card isn’t supported in 4.9-RELEASE. It only got included in the 5.2.x tree a few weeks ago. Great. So I dig out an old 4-port card. No joy there either. So in desperation, I’m building a Mandrake Linux machine on an old Pentium I to see if I can get the old card working with that one. I’ll use that other machine as a dumb fax-out machine. Episode two: the hard drive.

As mentioned in my previous entry, I just bought a spiffy new Western Digital 200gb hard drive. The idea was to put it in one of my external FireWire cases, where the old 120gb drive used to live. I installed it in the case, plugged it into the iBook, and was just about to format it when I noticed the capacity listed: 128gb. I looked inside the Firewire case to make sure the correct drive was in there. Yep, there it is. WD200. Screen says 128gb. Where did the other 72gb go? So after a couple of red herrings, I discovered an interesting article in Apple support. > Not all Macintosh products can take advantage of the full capacity of large (128 GB or greater) hard drives that use 48-bit LBA when they are connected via an ATA controller. Other controllers (SCSI or FireWire) are not affected. [Emphasis mine]

Okay, so some Macs can’t use big hard drives internally because of a ROM issue. I wonder if the chipset in my external drive case (the popular Oxford 911 chipset) is to blame here? After a bit more poking around, I’m 80% sure that the chipset’s the problem here. But, as the curse continues, Oxford’s support site appears to be down right now.

There’s a Firewire enclosure at work, and it’s newer than either of mine. I’ll do some testing with it, and hopefully my hunch will be correct.