[ale] Zapmedia Zapstation

[Brian Pitts]

James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Dead and gone with the dot com busts. If you hang a CD off the internal
> IDE connector you should be able to boot and load an OS (Linux only -
> please :)

It has two ide channels, one with a black connector and one with a blue 
connector. When I got it, the hard drive was connected to the blue 
connector and the dvd drive was connected to the black connector. I 
placed an Ubuntu 6.06 cd in the dvd drive and got the the three 
behaviors listed below.

1) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
"please wait starting up." The box then restarts and this happens again. 
After the second time, the monitor goes black except for a flashing 
cursor in the lower left. This occurs with if the hard drive is 
connected to the blue ide channel, i.e.

a) blue: hdd, black: dvd
b) blue: hdd, black: n/a

2) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
"please wait starting up." The box then restarts and this happens again, 
and again, and again, etc. This occurs if nothing is connected to the 
blue ide channel, i.e.

c) blue: n/a, black: dvd
d) blue: n/a, black: hdd
e) blue: n/a, black: n/a

3) The monitor displays "Loading stage 1 of 3" and the lcd displays 
"please wait starting up." The lcd then displays "power down your 
zapstation" and the monitor displays a blinking cursor in the upper 
left. This occurs if the dvd drive is connected to the blue ide channel, 
i.e.

f) blue: dvd, black:hdd
g) blue: dvd, black n/a

Behavior #3 doesn't change if the drive is empty or has a different 
bootable cd. I've also tried booting from usb with no luck.

I suppose my next step is to pull the drives out and test them in 
another system. Also, I'm worried that it might not recognize my usb 
keyboard, making my hit random keys and hope for BIOS setup attempts 
worthless, but since there are no ps/2 ports...

> and make a multi-media box yourself with some MP3 jukebox code
> from freshmeat.

That's my thought as well. If nothing else, I'm glad to have the case to 
stick another mini/micro motherboard in.

> The built-in modem is/was a cheap hunk of crap that even
> with the custom driver was junk at best (1+MB kernel driver that crashed
> the system on unload - I did NOT write it just had to code around it).

To think that only 6 years ago geeks actually had phone lines... I'm 
going to try to add a wireless card to the one pci slot, but I don't 
think the motherboard layout will make this easy.

-Brian