Tardis Observatory goings on

Aug04
by catz on August 4, 2017 at 08:56 and modified on August 4, 2017. at 08:57
Posted In: life the universe and everything


This has been our constant companion for a month now… a snake in the observatory. Ewwwww.
At least he still leaves fairly easily when pushed out the door.
The Torus telescope control computer is named Galileo and is a crica 1999 pentium 3 class system with an 80GB IDE drive that is also about 15 years old, toggled to pretend it is only a 32GB drive, that being the limit of the ASUS p2-99 motherboards BIOS. The drive gets very hot when spinning, typical of its era. We decided to try and replace it with a 32GB SATA SSD drive with an IDE to SATA adapter.

The $13 IDE to SATA Adapter was:

This was the $30 drive we settled on:

The software used to clone the drive was this: Crucial Data Transfer Suite with and Apricorn USB to SATA dongle and EZ Gig IV cloning software.


It took 6 attempts before everything finally worked out. The software has the ability to resize a larger drive to a smaller drive if the space is unused, but it takes time. With the added strangeness of a 32GB limit jumper on the 80GB drive, the drive adapter and linux partitions with some complex setup, the first few times did not work out.

In the end, it did start up, and continued to do so over 5 more reboot tests. Yay! Less power used out in the observatory, a faster newer drive, cooler, and less prone to suddenly fail!