Shizuma

I can't remember all I previously typed (see "updates" for exactly what I mean), but essentially some things happened and my best friend was able to get Shizuma back. While it was a bit unreal, I did check the battery/hard drive panel and sure enough the misalignment on the panel at the hard drive was there (from when I put a 11.5mm tall hard drive in without knowing/realising 9.5mm was the limit), so I knew it was Shizuma.

I was going to install Snow Leopard, but ended up poking around trying some live Linux distros while I was at my best friend's place since the DVD drive didn't seem to want to read the snow leopard disk for some reason.

Sometime later (at home), I got the DVD drive out of Shizuma and disassembled it to find nothing obviously wrong and once I put it back in, it read the disk just fine. I installed Snow Leopard after doing a "half and half" partition scheme on the hard drive and then installed Manjaro afterwards. Booting was kinda weird since it goes straight to GRUB2 and trying to boot OSX from GRUB2 results in a kernel panic, but this was solved by disabling GRUB2's OS probe and holding option when turning Shizuma on to properly boot OSX.

I found that I could put 8GB of ram in Shizuma as long as the firmware was at least a certain version, and Shizuma had the latest version (well, the last for that model) already installed when I checked.

I applied new thermal paste since I don't doubt that Shizuma had anything but the original paste, and found that a couple of the dies still had a miniscule amount of liquid non-solidified paste. I also found that the heatsink copper for one of the dies had oxidised unevenly in the pattern of the etched markings on the die. Surprisingly, the heatsink fins were fairly clean with some dust on the outer fins, but even though the airflow design's not really great for cooling, it's at least decent for keeping the heatsink fins clean.

I got the ram about a week after that and installed it before trying to run MemTest86 (after figuring out how why the option was missing in GRUB), finding that 4-5 passes is the usual amount that most people test for. I saw the first pass finish after about an hour, so I was thinking another three hours and it should be done, but I was wrong and I stopped the test after getting too tired from staying up.

I started again the next morning and after about an hour, the screen turned off, which I found the cause to be that Shizuma wasn't plugged in. after I plugged her in, I started it once more and occasionally glanced at the screen. First pass took an hour (as I had seen previously), second test took about two hours (which I was also aware of), third test took three hours, and the fourth took about four hours for a total of about eight hours.

I don't remember exactly when I went and reinstalled Snow Leopard and Manjaro, but I did it to repartition the drive since I really didn't need to give OSX half the drive.

The reason why MemTest86 didn't show up in GRUB2 was because of Shizuma's EFI, so I needed to use the UEFI version of MemTest86 which was luckily in AUR, and after installing and rebooting, it showed up in GRUB2.

Recently I got a laptop stand with fans, but with the minute space between the top of the stand and the bottom of Shizuma, the airflow isn't great. As of this draft writing, I'm currently designing a riser that uses the mesh to stabilise it's location and lift the hinge end about 20mm.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll be using Shizuma for, but I'll find a use at some point.

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With the laptop stand, I just used rubber feet to raise the hinge end up about 10mm (unless the stand I was originally talking about is a different one, I dunno). I also changed the 5 volt fans out for 12 volt ones and designed a replacement control board that uses a Firewire 400 jack to get power from Shizuma's Firewire 800 jack (via a Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 cable). I might write more about the replacment control board in a separate post, but don't hold your breath.