First post, by thepirategamerboy12
- Rank
- Oldbie
I recently acquired an old HP Vectra VL2 4/66 PC. It's a 486DX/50 with 12mb of RAM, a 1.2GB IDE HDD, an SB16 CT1790 sound card, and more. It works perfectly fine except for the CMOS battery being dead and one other far more annoying issue.
Fairly often, when the hard drive is accessing files, the drive will get "stuck." I guess that's the best way to explain it. The activity light is on solid, but you can't hear the drive chattering like usual and nothing is being read. It then takes a considerable amount of time for it to retry. This makes it very annoying to play games that access files on the HDD a lot and makes some like Stunt Driver pretty much impossible to play because I can't get past the title screen without the drive getting stuck and crashing the program due to the read error. It does actually seem certain things trigger it more than others, like starting up QuickTime in Windows 3.1 for example.
I do notice that in the BIOS, even though it auto detects the HDD, I actually have to set it to custom for it to boot. Not sure if that's related to the issue or not. And also, I don't think I noticed this problem when hooking up the drive through USB on my main computer. I would try another drive, but I don't have one of a compatible size that's not being used. Any ideas? Thanks.