Sounds like just the ticket, although my disks are magnetic. Thanks for the edification; for others unfamiliar with palimpsest:
palimpsest pal"imp*sest (p[a^]l"[i^]mp*s[e^]st), n. [L. palimpsestus, Gr. pali`mpshstos scratched or scraped again, pali`mpshston a palimpsest; pa`lin again + psh^n to rub, rub away: cf. F. palimpseste.] A parchment which has been written upon twice, the first writing having been erased to make place for the second. The erasures of ancient writings were usually carried on in monasteries, to allow the production of ecclesiastical texts, such as copies of church services and lives of the saints. The difficulty of recovering the original text varied with the process used to prepare the parchment for a fresh writing; the original texts on parchments which had been washed with lime-water and dried were easily recovered by a chemical process, but those erased by scraping the parchment and bleaching are difficult to interpret. Most of the manuscripts underlying the palimpsests that have been revived are fragmentary, but some are of great historical value. One Syriac version of the Four Gospels was discovered in 1895 in St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai by Mrs. Agnes Smith Lewis. See also the notes below. --Longfellow. [1913 Webster] Note: Palimpsest is the name given to ancient parchments which have been used more than once for writing purposes. The conquest of Egypt by the Saracens in the 7th century cut off from Europe the papyrus which was used to write on, and parchment could be had only in limited quantities. So through the dark ages, old manuscripts were used, after removing the first writing upon them. Sometimes the writing was washed off with a sponge, and the parchment smoothed with pumice stone; at other times the letters were scraped away with a sharp blade. Nearly all ancient manuscripts, however, were written with an ink which could not be entirely removed, and traces of a former writing could be seen beneath the new copy. In modern times there have been various efforts to restore these ancient writings by some chemical treatment. In this way have been found copies of the Republic of Cicero, the Institutes of Gaius, a part of the Epistle to the Romans, and other parts of the Old and New Testaments. The Republic of Cicero was covered by a commentary on the Psalms, written by St. Augustine. --Student's Cyclopedia, 1897. [PJC] Note: In an auction on November 6, 1998, a 12th-century palimpsest of one of Archimedes' works was sold for 2 million dollars. The 174-page book, the oldest known copy of Archimedes' work, had been owned by a French family since the 1920s, and was sold by Christie's auction house in New York to an unidentified private American collector. The palimpsest volume includes notes and calculations for two of the Greek mathematician's most famous theories, On Floating Bodies and Method of Mechanical Theorems. A Christie's spokesperson said the buyer, who was not identified, indicated that the work would be made available to scholars. Also bidding was the Greek government, which claimed the work was stolen from a library in the former Constantinople, now Istanbul, and belonged to Greece. According to the Athens News Agency, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem took Christie's to court claiming that the manuscript was part of its library, which had been transferred to Istanbul and later to Athens for safekeeping. The court, however, ruled that Christie's had the right to auction the manuscript for a French family, which claimed to own it for the last 75 years since one of the family's ancestors bought it from Orthodox monks in Istanbul. According to the court's ruling, French law applied in the case, under which a person who holds any object for more than 30 years becomes its rightful owner. [PJC] -- From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 palimpsest n : a manuscript (usually written on papyrus or parchment) on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible -- From WordNet (r) 2.0 On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 4:17 PM, John Jason Jordan <[email protected]>wrote: > On Sat, 17 Sep 2011 21:23:02 +0000 (UTC) > [email protected] dijo: > > >Sigh. > > > >I opened my desktop machine (Ubuntu) to do two things. First, to try > >to plug my Laptop drive in so I could dd it to an iso, Second, to pull > >the memory sticks to see which size they are. > > > >One set of drive cables in the desktop machine has the filled-in hole > >in the plug, which I assume is to insure that it is plugged into the > >drive the right way. My 2-1/2" adapter does not have a pin missing. > >The other set of cables is compatible, so I disconnected one of the > >secondary drives I have on the machine and plugged in the drive from > >my laptop. The machine would not boot. At this point I don't recall > >just where it failed. But I was able to get into the BIOS and see that > >it didn't see the laptop drive as installed. > > > >I returned the cables to their normal drive and then took out the > >memory. I pulled one of the sticks and found that I have PC2700 > >DDR333. So the next time I get down to Free Geek when the thrift store > >is open I can get the right speed. > > > >Now for the problem. When I turned the machine back on the bios only > >got as far as telling me it was going to check the NVRAM, but it never > >started the count-up. I tried pulling one memory stick, then the > >other, but that's all the farther it got. Now it doesn't even go that > >far. All I get is a series of beeps and a blank screen. > > > >I vaguely recall something like this in the past, and IIRC it involved > >the machine needing to warm up a bit. So, while I've been typing this > >e-mail I left the machine powered on. Just to confirm the conditions I > >mentioned above I shut it off and powered it back on. Now I can get to > >the bios. I can look at the four connected drives. and now it boots, > >but I have the Ubuntu message: > > > >Errors were found while checking the disk drive for / > > > >F to attempt to fix the errors, I to ignore, S to skip mounting of M > >for manual > > > >Any advice other than to power down and bring the box to the clinic > >tomorrow? With the rest of the experiences I've been having this week > >I'm quite hesitant to let the machine try fixing itself without > >knowing more about what's going on. > > I think the latest imbitations (cf. etymology of "incarnation") of > Ubuntu use Palimpsest disk utility which monitors disks for bad sectors > and other impending disasters. I recently found that it reliably > reported a disk that was about to fail; to the point that Seagate > replaced it under warranty (after additional tests). Whether Palimpsest > is capable of invoking other utilities to repair the disk is a question > I don't have an answer for. > > Unless someone else comes up with a better solution before tomorrow, > bring it to the Clinic. > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > -- [email protected] www.timlick.com 503-476-3119 10990 NE Paren Springs Rd. 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