Tested the newly acquired Compaq Portable 286. It would power cycle and after I took out the RLL/MFM controller, disconnected the drive (both data cables and power plug), and switched it on, it sprang up. I took the FDD/Serial/Parallel card out to see if it'll turn on and it does.

Granted, it might or will need a recap on the power supply, which is always a top priority.

MFM drives with gluey oil or stiction can draw enough power to stop things booting... you could try just plugging the drive to a brute of a PSU and see if it frees up, sounds like it's spinning free.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:26:

I've just spent the last three days with a very touchy Win98se installation, first it crashed every time I tried installing new […]
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NyLan wrote on 2022-02-24, 17:48:

Finished the setup of my A20M : […]
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Finished the setup of my A20M :

New Battery, old was KO
Full clean-up.
Put some old-new P3 and Window stickers
Replaced Cd player by a new CDRW ( also have a DVD in its pouch )
Replaced the HDD with a 256GB SSD
Setup Windows98SE and functional Ms-Dos 7.1
Installed Acronis True Image 8 to get a recovery partition in case of issue.

2022-02-24 10.45.44.jpg
2022-02-24 10.45.20.jpg
2022-02-24 10.45.09.jpg

I've just spent the last three days with a very touchy Win98se installation, first it crashed every time I tried installing new hardware drivers so I did a nuke and pave which fixed the issue, then it decided to not get along with the PCI sound card it had previously been fine with so I swapped the card for an identical one (same settings) and all was well again then it decided to crash at random times quake 3 arena was running with a known good GPU and clean drivers. (tested both cards in another PC and they work fine, no issues or driver problems)

That third time was my final straw with that 98 install and it and the HDD it resided on was removed from the PC and sent to my sin bin.

New HDD and a ME install and its now working perfectly, now I know what you may be thinking .. it was the HDD causing the issues... nope that HDD was repurposed as a XP boot drive and its running perfectly.

I still hate Win98 just as much now as I did back in the day, its a picky whiny little child of an OS that randomly throws tantrums and wont take no for an answer.

That's why I'm creating a ghost image as soon as I have a working installation 😉
Also prefer to put a SSD when I can. So much faster and reliable.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:57:

MFM drives with gluey oil or stiction can draw enough power to stop things booting... you could try just plugging the drive to a brute of a PSU and see if it frees up, sounds like it's spinning free.

When it comes to older drives like that, I usually stick to CF cards so I can copy files over easily.

So a stuck MFM drive can cause issues like that (power cycling)? Would I recap to play it safe still? My XT isn't 100% reliable due to PSU issues (capacitors need to be replaced and I have new caps ready).

NyLan wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:58:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-24, 22:26:

I've just spent the last three days with a very touchy Win98se installation, first it crashed every time I tried installing new […]
Show full quote

NyLan wrote on 2022-02-24, 17:48:

Finished the setup of my A20M : […]
Show full quote

Finished the setup of my A20M :

New Battery, old was KO
Full clean-up.
Put some old-new P3 and Window stickers
Replaced Cd player by a new CDRW ( also have a DVD in its pouch )
Replaced the HDD with a 256GB SSD
Setup Windows98SE and functional Ms-Dos 7.1
Installed Acronis True Image 8 to get a recovery partition in case of issue.

2022-02-24 10.45.44.jpg
2022-02-24 10.45.20.jpg
2022-02-24 10.45.09.jpg

I've just spent the last three days with a very touchy Win98se installation, first it crashed every time I tried installing new hardware drivers so I did a nuke and pave which fixed the issue, then it decided to not get along with the PCI sound card it had previously been fine with so I swapped the card for an identical one (same settings) and all was well again then it decided to crash at random times quake 3 arena was running with a known good GPU and clean drivers. (tested both cards in another PC and they work fine, no issues or driver problems)

That third time was my final straw with that 98 install and it and the HDD it resided on was removed from the PC and sent to my sin bin.

New HDD and a ME install and its now working perfectly, now I know what you may be thinking .. it was the HDD causing the issues... nope that HDD was repurposed as a XP boot drive and its running perfectly.

I still hate Win98 just as much now as I did back in the day, its a picky whiny little child of an OS that randomly throws tantrums and wont take no for an answer.

That's why I'm creating a ghost image as soon as I have a working installation 😉
Also prefer to put a SSD when I can. So much faster and reliable.

I guess, I dont bother with SSD for DOS/98, if I have to go solid state then it'll be SD or CF, Ill happily use SSD for XP or Vista since they support 128/250gb SSDs right out of the box with no extra fucking around partitioning them.

But when it comes down to it, DOS and 95/98/ME are fast enough with a 8mb cache HDD, or a Raptor with a Sata PCi card and unless its a build I will be keeping around I dont see the need to waste solid sate storage on it.

I have some really cool spinning rust drives, like the 8 15k RPM SCSI drives I have in storage or the Velociraptor collection I have or the few old Seagate drives that make the awesome sounds . .even a few RLL drives that unless you have heard them working you wont understand how cool they sound.

If I really wanted to go old school cool I could drag the rusty brick out of its box and fire up some MFM muscle 😁

I used CF in my DOS / Win98 S7 machine for years along with a period correct spinner and it was OK, but when the spinner started clicking I dumped the lot and went with a little 16GB SSD and it's glorious. So quick. So silent. I love it!

I used to be fond of the sound of a hard disk spinning but now I'm old and grumpy and will only use computers with solid state storage, SSD, CF, SD, whatever. Just give me silence and stay off of my lawn.

Some old 40GB Seagate drives from my collection, is about as far back as I'll go storage-wise. If forced. They're just far enough over the Archaic Boundary to give some modicum of non-suckage. And can be made to reliably work with a few old generations of interest, if nothing better is available in the moment.

Anything further back slipped over into nopesville quite some time ago.

Related. I've had a CF-IDE adapter sitting on the shelf for about 2 years now, unused. Never casually found a worthwhile current source for CF cards, it all seemed to get expensive in recent years - and I'm not paying a million bucks for a few MB/GB of storage, however convenient. Haven't spent much time looking, to be honest, but put it this way - the adapter itself will very likely turn out to be cheaper than any reliable card ever sourced for it in the current market.

My 8088, 386, 486 (laptops and desktop), and Pentium laptop use SSDs (either CF to IDE, XT-CF, SD to IDE, or mSATA to SATA, SATA to IDE) and not only are they running more swiftly, it's quieter than before.

My Wyse 286 uses a 4.3GB HDD and it'll get replaced in the future if that goes out and my Socket 370 could use a solid state method since the 60GB is on its last sectors.

In fact, my PS2 30001 and 50001 use 200GB HDDs for games that prevents strain on the optical lens. I had a working 20MB HardCard and that stopped working all of a sudden or the Commodore Colt PC was bitching about it and decided to blow a gasket (tried to get it to work and the system is still dead).

bjwil1991 wrote on 2022-02-25, 00:52:

My 8088, 386, 486 (laptops and desktop), and Pentium laptop use SSDs (either CF to IDE, XT-CF, SD to IDE, or mSATA to SATA, SATA to IDE) and not only are they running more swiftly, it's quieter than before.

My Wyse 286 uses a 4.3GB HDD and it'll get replaced in the future if that goes out and my Socket 370 could use a solid state method since the 60GB is on its last sectors.

In fact, my PS2 30001 and 50001 use 200GB HDDs for games that prevents strain on the optical lens. I had a working 20MB HardCard and that stopped working all of a sudden or the Commodore Colt PC was bitching about it and decided to blow a gasket (tried to get it to work and the system is still dead).

SD/CF/SSD is the way to go for systems you will keep around, for testing and tinkering meh I just grab a compatible HDD off the shelf, its faster and less work than pissing about trying to get solid state setup and working on a system that will be disassembled by days end. All that said .. there is nothing quite like the sound of a Velociraptor Raid spinning up, I'm sure I would miss it if the PC didn't at least sound like a demon at boot, thankfully its pretty quite once running.

Still not sure I would be putting a SSD on anything using DOS or 95/98/ME sure it works once you have it partitioned correctly but a 16/32/64/128gb SD>CF adaptor works out of the box and is cheaper than a SSD, far easier to simpler replace/backup too.

Having a real mechanical drive in an older computer is the way to go. However, those drives tend to fail after many years and the only two drives I have that are working (pre-LBA) are a 210MB Maxtor and a 428MB Seagate that are getting close to or are 30 years old or older.

Adrian of Adrian's Digital Basement did a teardown of a dead drive in one episode and found that the rubber used as a bumper for the when the head was parked had decomposed into that sticky rubber gunk. So the head had parked at some point and was later unable to free itself.

I wonder how many drives have this particular time bomb in them. There's just no way to know without opening it up.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-25, 03:47:

Adrian of Adrian's Digital Basement did a teardown of a dead drive in one episode and found that the rubber used as a bumper for the when the head was parked had decomposed into that sticky rubber gunk. So the head had parked at some point and was later unable to free itself.

I wonder how many drives have this particular time bomb in them. There's just no way to know without opening it up.

A whole generation of them do, its the same evil stuff that IBM/Lenovo used on ThinkPad's as a shell cover and a ton of other things used for soft covering.

All of them turned into a sticky evil mess that no retro hobbyist wants to deal with.

Next one I'm gonna try dredging it in powdered sugar and leaving it on an ant hill 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:07:

Next one I'm gonna try dredging it in powdered sugar and leaving it on an ant hill 🤣

Next one what ?

Are you suggesting the Ants will eat a MFM drive ?

Heh, no next thing externally covered in rubberised goop.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:15:

Heh, no next thing externally covered in rubberised goop.

*nods

I suspect the Ants will deliver it back to you with an official letter of protest against cruel and unusual punishment.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:05:

A whole generation of them do, its the same evil stuff that IBM/Lenovo used on ThinkPad's as a shell cover and a ton of other things used for soft covering.

All of them turned into a sticky evil mess that no retro hobbyist wants to deal with.

It's possible to clean this stuff off but it is extremely laborious and tedious to do so. Ask me how I know.

LGR did an episode where he found some hand held device where the entire plastic housing was molded in the stuff. Imagine your device literally melting away to goop. Gross!

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:47:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 04:05:

A whole generation of them do, its the same evil stuff that IBM/Lenovo used on ThinkPad's as a shell cover and a ton of other things used for soft covering.

All of them turned into a sticky evil mess that no retro hobbyist wants to deal with.

It's possible to clean this stuff off but it is extremely laborious and tedious to do so. Ask me how I know.

LGR did an episode where he found some hand held device where the entire plastic housing was molded in the stuff. Imagine your device literally melting away to goop. Gross!

I dont need to imagine >>

Had experience with it myself and yup had the exact same thoughts I bet you did.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-25, 02:49:

bjwil1991 wrote on 2022-02-25, 00:52:

My 8088, 386, 486 (laptops and desktop), and Pentium laptop use SSDs (either CF to IDE, XT-CF, SD to IDE, or mSATA to SATA, SATA to IDE) and not only are they running more swiftly, it's quieter than before.

My Wyse 286 uses a 4.3GB HDD and it'll get replaced in the future if that goes out and my Socket 370 could use a solid state method since the 60GB is on its last sectors.

In fact, my PS2 30001 and 50001 use 200GB HDDs for games that prevents strain on the optical lens. I had a working 20MB HardCard and that stopped working all of a sudden or the Commodore Colt PC was bitching about it and decided to blow a gasket (tried to get it to work and the system is still dead).

SD/CF/SSD is the way to go for systems you will keep around, for testing and tinkering meh I just grab a compatible HDD off the shelf, its faster and less work than pissing about trying to get solid state setup and working on a system that will be disassembled by days end. All that said .. there is nothing quite like the sound of a Velociraptor Raid spinning up, I'm sure I would miss it if the PC didn't at least sound like a demon at boot, thankfully its pretty quite once running.

Still not sure I would be putting a SSD on anything using DOS or 95/98/ME sure it works once you have it partitioned correctly but a 16/32/64/128gb SD>CF adaptor works out of the box and is cheaper than a SSD, far easier to simpler replace/backup too.

There's no extra-job using a SSD. Same as others ( CF or HDD ) : partition ( if needed ) or just format and install. IDE to SATA adapters cost same price as IDE /CF adapters in my rgion.
And I have more than 20x 128/256GB SSDs laying around so it's cheaper for me 😜