Interesting. Will it just say DS#### on the chip on the board? I'll look for it, that sounds great. Some parts of this board are hard to reach though.
This is what I was thinking too. The adapter I have does have its own power supply plugged in to molex. But it turns off when I also plug in usb.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19281192
> A few days ago I posted about my old PC and there was some interest, here's an update.
>
> tldr: the hdd saved everything! It has windows 3.1 and all the games I remember are still there.
>
> Longer story:
> I bought a few adapters for PATA/IDE to USB and they didn't work. I had this weird issue where when I plugged the usb into my computer, the drive would power off. You can hear it spinning when it's on, plug in USB, drive powers off. Unplug USB, drive powers back on. So after buying 2 different adapters, I gave up on trying to read it that way.
>
> Then, I got a floppy reader and a bunch of floppy disks. The software testdisk has a DOS version, so I copied that to a floppy and ran it on the computer. While it was analyzing the HDD it told me in an error message that the drive appeared smaller than it actually is, and I should update my bios settings.
>
> After struggling to figure out how to get to bios (ctrl alt s, AFTER BOOTING), I googled my drive model and found the cylinders, heads, sectors information and manually typed that into the BIOS as a "user defined" hard drive, and that was all it needed to be able to read the drive.
>
> After that it booted straight into PC DOS + Windows 3.1 and everything is there. I found recipes, games, and other programs.
>
> I was going to try to send files over serial, but it wasn't working for me (i still haven't tried zmodem yet) but I couldn't even receive an echo to the serial port. So I've been backing things up by copying to floppy disk, then reading the disk on my laptop with a reader.
>
> !Image of hard drive
>
> !Image of the computer running kings quest
>
> !Running testdisk
A few days ago I posted about my old PC and there was some interest, here's an update.
tldr: the hdd saved everything! It has windows 3.1 and all the games I remember are still there.
Longer story: I bought a few adapters for PATA/IDE to USB and they didn't work. I had this weird issue where when I plugged the usb into my computer, the drive would power off. You can hear it spinning when it's on, plug in USB, drive powers off. Unplug USB, drive powers back on. So after buying 2 different adapters, I gave up on trying to read it that way.
Then, I got a floppy reader and a bunch of floppy disks. The software testdisk has a DOS version, so I copied that to a floppy and ran it on the computer. While it was analyzing the HDD it told me in an error message that the drive appeared smaller than it actually is, and I should update my bios settings.
After struggling to figure out how to get to bios (ctrl alt s, AFTER BOOTING), I googled my drive model and found the cylinders, heads, sectors information and manually typed that into the BIOS as a "user defined" hard drive, and that was all it needed to be able to read the drive.
After that it booted straight into PC DOS + Windows 3.1 and everything is there. I found recipes, games, and other programs.
I was going to try to send files over serial, but it wasn't working for me (i still haven't tried zmodem yet) but I couldn't even receive an echo to the serial port. So I've been backing things up by copying to floppy disk, then reading the disk on my laptop with a reader.
Someone here said NetBSD could work. Another person sent a link to someone who did manage to get linux on a floppy disk, that could work.
Honestly I have no idea. It's further down on my want-to-do list, and the only thing I can personally think of (without having done any research on it) is like linux from scratch, or a similar source version where I disable almost every kernel feature, and suffer through finding the right settings to enable for this hardware.
We'll see how far I get. I mean if I can just do copy file \\.\COM# on the DOS side and cat /dev/tty# > file on my laptop side then I'll be happy.
Thanks for that. Looked online a bit, I'm going to order an rs232 to usb null modem cable. Then it looks like in DOS I should be able to set the baud and just copy a file to the port. On the receiving side I can program something to just read from the com port straight to a file. Add some automation and voila. 🤞
Right now the challenge is to get data off of my 5.25" floppy disks. Online shops are full of 3.5" to usb readers, but nothing for 5.25".
The reader in the computer still works.
I'm considering trying to send files out through the serial port, if I can figure out how to send a file to it. Then I could use anything to read from the other end of the serial port and write the file.
I want to see what (if anything) i can copy from the drive, and then I'll give this a shot and see how much mileage I can get out of it!
The gotek looks like a cool way to add usb storage support. I'm hesitant only because this thing boots from the 3.5" drive right now so I don't want to touch that, but if I fix the hard drive problems and it boots from there then I might do this.
I do want to get an SSD in here, a friend of mine has done it before on a similarly old windows 98 system.
I can try it out once i learn how to use this thing. I'm gonna have to get a usb floppy reader/writer to copy stuff from a modern computer.
Interesting, I do have some floppy disks that claim to be ms-dos. I also have some windows 95 and 98 cds. The hard drive isn't making any click of death sounds as far as I can tell, but I haven't exercised it. I just know the stuff currently on it is corrupted since I get read errors trying to exec anything. I wrote a text file, was able to read it back, so reinstalling might work, but i think a whole new drive would be best.
I saw that the bios lets me change the cpu speed to fast/slow, does that have anything to do with the turbo you think?
Yea this thing needs a new drive. Trying to run any programs on it gives me read errors. I need to figure out what linux it could run. I'm comfortable with linux, but not with this kind of hardware.
Ah, I think I did read that somewhere. This one is still kicking though. I dug it out of my brother's attic last year and finally got around to powering it on.
Is it bad? 😂 I don't know anything about these old machines, but it works and I'll see how much I can do with it.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19133125
> I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it's running from the floppy and doesn't need to be installed first. > > If you guys are interested, I'll post it running some things tomorrow. There's a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that's a possibility on 6MB of RAM. > > !Image of BIOS > > !Image of directory listing
I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it's running from the floppy and doesn't need to be installed first.
If you guys are interested, I'll post it running some things tomorrow. There's a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that's a possibility on 6MB of RAM.
Even renting a place these days requires a credit check. So unfortunately, yes.
The shareholders probably care, but to the layman, expecting 6.61 billion and only earning 6.49 billion doesn't amount to much. They're not going anywhere.