Hardware Follies: Defeated by the Disk

So, I spent the weekend tinkering on and off with my "Project 98"
computer; a retro-PC with Windows98 on it. I decided I wanted to add a
second hard-drive to it; the old one was down to 7GB. Since that
computer mainly exists to play Win9x-era games (some of which run
poorly on modern hardware), and I use CD-images for all the games
rather than original media*, a larger HDD was a necessity. I've
acquired a number of 'new' games that I wanted to install on that PC,
but I just didn't have the space!

Unfortunately, my supply of PATA drives is limited; I've only three
left in the closet, and one of those has bad sectors on it. The other
two were a 250GB and a 300GB drives. But surely I could make it work?

Well, maybe. PCs of that era often had BIOS limitations that made it
difficult to use hard-drives that big; you'd pop in a 300GB drive and
it would only see 32GB. But even before I got that far, I had to get
the PC to recognize the drive existed at all! It turns out the
motherboard was incredibly finicky; it only acknowledged the drives'
existence if I used one of the two IDE ports. It also didn't help that
the jumper settings on the drive itself were incorrectly labeled.
Plus, that PC has one of the slowest boot-ups I've ever seen; it takes
about two minutes just to get into the BIOS to see if the drive is
recognized.

But finally, after much jumper-switching and cable-wrangling, the BIOS
acknowledged that yes, I DID have a second HDD installed. Eureka! Now
all I had to do was convince Windows98 of the same fact.

This shouldn't have been difficult. Drop into DOS, use FDISK to create
a partition, then format; reboot and viola, there's a new drive in
Windows Explorer. It's usually a slow but easy task. Not this time
though. I'd make the partition, reboot and... nothing. FDISK showed
the drive as being unpartitioned.

Well, Win9x FDISK was limited in what sort of drives it could handle.
Maybe that was the problem? I'd just fire up a proper partition
manager and use that instead. Except... my suite of disk-tools was all
on a DVD, and the computer in question only had a CD-ROM. <sigh>.
Well, no problem; we'll burn the tools onto a CD-ROM.

That's when the CD-burner died, of course. Fortunately, I'm not
without spares. I was, however, without extra CD-R discs. I'd used the
last one just as the old CD-R drive killed itself. It was just one of
those weekends.

Long story short, I eventually got a new CD-R drive, I got some extra
CD-R discs, and I made myself a bootable CD-ROM with
partition-management tools. I was back on track! And after much
fiddling about, I /finally/ got a partition to stick on the drive
through reboots. Sure, it didn't use the full capacity of the drive
(only 120GB of the 250GB total was recognized) but I was okay with
that. At long last, I was back on track! Now just to reboot into
Windows...

Oh, it wants to do a Scandisk on the new hard-drive. Well, might as
well. Anyway, it's a good sign. It shows that the OS recognizes the
hard-drive.

Five hours later, no errors found, booting into Windows and...

Huh. Explorer shows TWO new hard-drives... and neither one of them
appear formatted to the OS.

So, yeah... that's where I gave up; no new hard-drive for me. There
are still some tricks I could try (like using Ontrack disk overlay)
but at that time I'd spent the whole weekend (on and off) fiddling
with the thing and I just wanted to call it quits. I buttoned up the
Project98 PC, neatly put away the tools and spare hard-drives, and
went off to do other things. One day I'll get that added capacity...
but today wasn't that day.

I enjoy fiddling with old hardware; I like the challenges of getting
it all to work. And overall, I don't mind the difficulties I
encountered this weekend. But sometimes it doesn't work out well, and
requires a bit more persistence than you'd expect. I know I'll get it
working eventually but for the time being, I admitted defeat, and
appreciated how much easier it is with modern computers.






* Daemontools for the win! I hate constantly switching disks.