Re: Hardware Follies: Defeated by the Disk

On Tue, 20 May 2025 13:36:34 +0300, Anssi Saari
<anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:
>

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?

>
And here I thought, didn't I have a larger drive than that already by
mid-90s? Then I realized, oh no, my second "large" HD was 500 MB not 500
GB, probably bought in 1993. Oh well. I remember I did try to avoid all
issues with large drives, no overlays or weird stuff like that and
somehow managed. Just don't remember how. Maybe I just stuck with
reasonably small drives that didn't cross any lines.

Back in 98, I probably was rockin' 8-30GB hard-disks. If my records
are anything to go by, the first hard-drive I got that was >100GB was
a Western Digital 120GB drive (Geforce 4800Ti 128MB and 8MB cache!) in
2003 (paired with my AMD Athlon 3000+ and Geforce 4800Ti 128MB ;-).

The hard-drives in my Project98 box are /definitely/ not period
accurate, but that was never my goal anyway. I just wanted a fun
Windows98 machine that would let me play all the old classics on
native hardware, and a big hard-drive let me bypass all the annoyances
of having to fiddle around with optical disks all the time. I'm not
surprised the BIOS (or, really, the OS) doesn't fully support disks
that large.

    (Honestly, I think what I /really/ should do is swap the
      motherboard to something slightly more modern --I've an
      AMD Athlon 900 that would be perfect-- but I'm too cheap
      to buy the necessary CPU cooling fan. Besides, I /like/
      the Slot-1 form-factor of the Pentium II)

I'll figure it all out, eventually. But it amused me at how much I'd
forgotten; hardware travails like the above used to be my
bread'n'butter. But nowadays modern PC hardware is so much easier to
use that I've lost a bit of the old skills. ;-)