Anyway... I've just become the owner of a retired 3920 (not a 'B' model, as near as I can tell). Am I the first one on the board to dig into one of these, or has anyone else tweaked with it?
It was/is functional, so no worries there. At this time, my accomplishments with it are:
--Figuring out how to get the case off -- pretty easy, actually.
--Taking a binary-level snapshot of the disk drive for backup purposes. It's a HGST Travelstar, PATA, 30GB.
Other things I've noted: The CMOS battery is a standard CR2032 coin cell, the CPU board has a Type A USB connector on it (for initial imaging of the drive? Something else?) Also, the SBC module has two SATA connectors on it. Perhaps a SATA drive could be substituted, since PATA's are getting pretty rare?
I know this instrument runs Linux as its base OS. Enabled options are controlled by a license file on the disk, no idea if there's an EEPROM to preserve option info in case of disk failure. I would think the disk should be mountable on any Linux system. I won't know for certain until I do a hardware clone to another drive (got to locate one of appropriate capacity and type).
Next steps are going to include trying to get into CMOS setup and note how the settings are done. Essentially, I want to be able to do a bare-metal restore in case of a hard drive failure.
So -- Anyone else working with these?
