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Bad news, located here: http://moogle-tech.com/blog/?p=24

bummer, have you thought about a virtual machine or dual booting? Virtualbox is really good (don't know if theres a windows version), VMware is also good

Yeah, QEMU and VirtualBox both do quite a good job now for free (and both run on Windows hosts).

those prices are very high imho, 2gb of storage goes for about 360 euro's here, a new mobo+cpu+ram in el cheapo land should cost you no more than 150 euros

You underestimate just in what shitty state the US dollar is in right now, Tetsuo, not to mention the fact that the whole notion here is to get something name-brand. I've been burned by attempting to do something in a slipshod do-it-yourself manner, and I've pretty much had it with self-building machines at this point. I'd take donations of computing hardware in a pinch, I'm just not going to go out of my way to do it.

qemu and other virtual machines are a good idea in theory, but I'm consistently running on the edge of around 2GBytes free on my laptop, along with the fact that I doubt my laptop has the oomph to handle compiling MESS and running a virtual machine at the same time. I'm also not aware of whether or not it's actually possible to get files back off of that virtual machine, but I haven't really kept up with all of the latest and greatest VM technology.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, do I expect donations? I really don't. It's a request, nothing more. If I get donations and I end up finding some way to recover the data on the drive or drives that have gone kaput, the donations will be put towards a new drive or drives, and I'll continue living on the edge with a northbridge-fan-less machine. If there are excess funds left over, I intend to refund any donations that comprised the excess.

Ultimately, I have no problem letting PIN64 rot a while until I come up with the funds myself in a year, year and a half or so, then picking up where I left off. I'm just giving my faithful readers the opportunity to get things going sooner than that.

I see what you're saying, but I would suggest shopping around for a better price. I bought my system from Tiger Direct and was quite pleased. You can configure a system with brand name parts, and can order it without an OS. It comes with at least a one-year warranty, which can be extended. My video card went bad and I got a replacement with no hassle. Something like this might be a good starting point, but there's quite a bit to choose from:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2371075&CatId=1307

Of course, 2TB of disk space isn't going to be cheap, but I figure if you can knock the price down some it will help.

MooglyGuy, although you're right about the euro vs dollar situation, but taxes here are so sky high that its usually euro = dollar. Dell isn't exactly the cheapest place to get crappy hardware with a brand sticker on top. I do understand why you would wan't a pre-built system, but adding the harddrives yourself shouldn't be a problem, there are wayyy cheaper sources for high quality hdd's

VMware Workstation 5.x/6.x and Player 2.0 (unfortunately not the Server 1.0. 2.0 is still in beta and not usable at all) have the "Shared Folder" feature, which is extremely easy to use and gives you direct access to folders on the host system from the guest system.

VMware Player and Server are free and you can get nice pre-installed VMwares at www.thoughtpolice.co.uk.

But if you are running low on disk space, this is obviously no solution for you. Another option would be cross-compilation on windows. I never did that, but apparently it works fine.

The good RB seems to have pulled my ass out of the fire, at least partially, thanks to the donation of a new motherboard with everything functional.

The disk array may still be a lost cause, though. Not sure. More info on my recovery effort here: http://moogle-tech.com/blog/?p=25