Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!border-3.nntp.ord.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-1.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 17:05:05 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Subject: Re: Hardware Follies: Defeated by the Disk Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 13:04:41 -0400 Message-ID: References: X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 43 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-9aA4Rt4/zlImch5WOMKQuaIsFMOwxKFbPU5ZaFDwOCFwoedKTS0x8AyMVf8zL8LrcA13dtIL99nKKpS!B3BvM3Lip9mjzhelInKDM+/JzKUP0aXGlfo5wK09Ij4cGa+Z25MDYdClnGht6BFaBsQSWmN/ X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 On Tue, 20 May 2025 13:36:34 +0300, Anssi Saari wrote: >Spalls Hurgenson 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. ;-)