Bigfoot, the original one :D

Justintime · 30 Jun 2015 at 15:41

Any ideas on what a solid red light means on a 4Gb (yes) Quantum Bigfoot disk? Trying to recover some picture data for a friend whos found it in the loft after maybe 17 years. Due to the size i can't slot it into my IDE USB slot load so i've got it hooked up to an old PIII board i had laying about. Theres a solid orange/red light on the pcb, i can hear and feel the spinup but no detection. Only ever had a Bigfoot TS 6Gb many years ago which i got rid of quick due to it being spectacularly slow so my experience is limited. Pretty sure the jumpers are set to master..guess its dead?

darael · 30 Jun 2015 at 18:45

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/...uantum_jumper_settings/bigfoot_cy_jumpers.pdf

The way I read those jumper settings, only the DS jumper should be jumpered if it's the only IDE device on the cable. Is this way you have it configured? I'm also assuming it's the CY series, as (according to Wiki) the original series only went up to 2.5GB.

Justintime · 1 Jul 2015 at 09:27

Thanks for that, forgot who eventually got Quantum in the end, was it Maxtor/Quantum that merged then Seagate acquired if i remember right?. Yes i had it that way, seems like the drive needed some warming up after all this time as after several spinups it started to flash green

Copied all of the data from it and gave my friend. God, digital cameras were horrible back then, apparently all of those files were from a Sony Mavica Camera that used floppies for storage

Thanks for checking

skyripper · 6 Jul 2015 at 12:34

Good lord, I had one of those back in the Pentium Slot One days. I'd forgotten that monstrosity of cheap engineering existed (even though it was all I could afford at the time!)

Justintime · 7 Jul 2015 at 12:37

Yep i encountered one in an IBM Aptiva K6-2 266Mhz machine for the first time and was amazed what a difference there was when i put a proper hard drive in, forgot what the proper hdd was now, maybe a 4Gb fireball.. same machine got a 17Gb WD172AA a few years later before retirement and the user was happy. My own 6Gb was bought for data storage but even at that it was too slow and sold off quick.

PhillyDee · 7 Jul 2015 at 16:39

I had a 1Gb Quantum Bigfoot in my P200MMX 32mb ram (the first PC I bought with my very first job!) even overclocked it by changing the jumper to a 233MMX . . . . I didn't even know what I was doing at the time really!

They were notorious at the time. Mine was a Special Reserve PC and it failed after 11 months. The bloke came out, said, Yup, all these drives fail around the 12 months of use mark, said I can give you a 5Gb drive for £25 wink wink. So I did