Re: Hardware Follies: Defeated by the Disk

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 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.
 

All of this oddly resonates with me. Having to hunt for functional IDE
drives, then finding CD-R's that were not utter crap... and in the end
having to use another mothballed PC to burn the install disc because my
current Dell won't burn at less than 10X, which is not great when you
have devices that are extremely pick with CD-R's (if someone tells you
that you can record at 32X and it will work the same as 1X, they are
filthy liars).
With regards to the HDD, I ended using a CF to ide adapter and
industrial cards. It's nice being able to switch between Windows 95, 98
and even japanese windows for playing touhou games. With the added bonus
of being able to copy files to the card from my main PC, since my retro
build lacks USB ports.