Just because you put +5V, +12V, and ground on the Molex plug doesn’t mean the drive is going to be powered up and spinning. The controller on the drive controls the motors (duh) and may be shutting the whole works down if it’s receiving what it interprets as invalid or malformed commands.

I was trying the same thing years ago, with a mid-90s HDD, a dedicated power supply for it, and a couple different IDE-USB adapters, and never got it to work. The drive shutting down when USB adapter is plugged in sounds familiar.

You got it. The IDE-USB adapters will technically only work with drives supporting ATA-2 (EIDE and newer).

Lots of arcade games and other amusement machines made in the last twenty years run on desktop Linux.

Incredible Technologies games, Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix Big Buck Hunter Pro, Arachnid dartboards, and TouchTunes jukeboxes off the top of my head.

Sorry. If there is a keyboard key or other input event to scroll it, you could set a touchscreen gesture to emulate that input?

This trope is false; frogs will attempt to escape when the water gets unpleasantly hot. They don’t allow themselves to be boiled.

Just saying.

Does double tap and drag work?

Meaning: tap, lift, tap without lifting, drag.

I have a similar PATA enclosure. I thought it was cursed until I got to reuse the A-A cable to upload FlashFloppy custom firmware to Gotek floppy emulators without wiring up a USB-serial adaptor.

It works for Ultimate Boot CD, which includes DBAN and a lot of other fun stuff.

I play with retro hardware and Ventoy has also worked for me with some weird old isos that even Rufus didn’t work with (XP/Server 2003 multidisc from eXPerience that uses a Linux bootloader?)

This, I tried some newer distros with Wayland and ended up going back to Debian Stable and X11 for gaming. Got Sunshine (for Moonlight handheld client streaming) working for in about a minute.

I always feel old when they’re playing Ramones over the loudspeakers at the grocery store.

Hiren’s Boot CD PE

I had to put my wife’s LG-made Google Nexus phone in the fridge to wirelessly back it up without it overheating.

Also got a free 65" Samsung TV because original owner couldn’t stand its blue blotches.

Everyone, race to the bottom!

I maintain older hardware at work. We have a platform based on a Biostar motherboard with no USB3 ports, and it will not boot from any USB3 drive I’ve tried. Any USB2 drives work fine. Picky, picky! 🤷

Oof. It’s extremely easy with Ventoy.

Thanks for replying, everyone! This project is temporarily on hold; downloading and sha256sum-ming some different isos led me to discover that my main system has a RAM issue. 🤦

I just learned to not trust motherboards’ automatic RAM voltage setting; only one of four sticks seems to be sensitive to the apparent undervoltage that it was running on.

Edit: I hope that whoever designed the style of RAM slot that has a latch on only one side stubs their toe every day for the rest of their life.

Try some non-Razer input devices. I’ve seen multiple systems act strangely because of them, although the usual problem is that the system won’t POST with the offending device plugged in… Unplug, boot system, plug in, and it works fine (until it’s time to reboot or power-cycle).

I wonder if your K400 is defective. I have the old black & white K400r (refurbished?) and the batteries last for many months even when I forget to switch it off.