VOGONS


First post, by Jed118

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First was a hard disk (unformatted), the rest were diskettes, trying to get DOS to boot to format the drive.

tOlWLf1l.jpg

It's been a night - one more Quantum drive RIP.

Last edited by Jed118 on 2019-06-22, 10:53. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 1 of 30, by Caluser2000

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Cabling around the right way? Stripe towards pin 1. If the drive is unformatted and has no system files of course you'll get a boot error. I had one drive that gave that error and it hadn't been set to active in fdisk. Once set active it booted up SuSE 7.2.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 2 of 30, by Jed118

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No, it was a series of random unlabelled diskettes, the 5th one was the correct one. I just found it funny that it told me 5 different ways that it could not boot 😉

My Quantum Prodrive kicked the bucket randomly, so I had to put in another drive and prepare the computer... again...

Last edited by Jed118 on 2019-06-21, 15:34. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 3 of 30, by BinaryDemon

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Wow, super unlucky. You should probably stay in bed today and avoid the real world.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 5 of 30, by SirNickity

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Haha.. "ooh! BINGO!" 😁

I had a Quantum drive fail on me a couple weeks ago. Huh. Must be something in the water. Either that or shouldn't be putting hard disks in the dishwasher.

Reply 6 of 30, by Jed118

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I had another wonky Quantum 1.2 Gb with bad sectors that was causing Win98 to give registry errors upon boot (offers to fix the registry popups, and the like) just now. Even as a formatted slave it would cause the OS grief. Grief stopped when I removed the drive. Like, instantly.

TBH though, these drives are a quarter century old, so when they worked, they worked well. During the 90s and 2000s they were good drives, except for Bigfoot units - those suck no matter what time period you're in.

I have exactly one Prodrive LPS (540 Mb) in my spares now, and that came out of my DLC system when I replaced it with an SSD unit. I ought to check if it still works... I'd be sad to see that one fail, it's been with me for two decades.

SirNickity wrote:

Either that or shouldn't be putting hard disks in the dishwasher.

640K worth of WAT? Cleaning the disks usually involves a DBAN, sir... 😜

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Reply 7 of 30, by Caluser2000

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I've got quite a number of BigFoot drives. They all work perfectly and ideal for taking up those 5.25" drive bays without adapters. Currently have one in my 386DX25 and XT Turbo systems. They came from various systems in sizes up to 6gig. It's interesting to see what was on them, mostly Win95 stuff but one had OS/2 v3 and it flew on my 166mhz test setup. I've had more issues with 3.5" fdds lately. 5 out of 9 not working recently on a known good setup. I was very surprised at this because they are generally robust pieces of kit. Instant floppy drive i/o error on startup. No cable swapping or reverse connection helped at all. Got about 30 spare though out in the shed..

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 8 of 30, by Jed118

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First pic of thread should about tell you how I feel about Bigfoot drives:

Building a hard drive display thing out of plexiglass!

Honestly, even in the 90s I had replaced so many of these with conventional drives.

Even the one in this build thread failed so badly that I had to rig up an external DC motor to move it, using an elastic band around the shaft, using the media surface as a rough guide. What a fitting end for a hard drive, to act as a mere pulley to move itself not even using its own motor

That's all they're worth IMO.

On a related note, I have just installed Windows 3.1 for the 30430-42 time using the same floppy disks I used in grade 8 (mid 90s).

Maybe this is all subjective 😵

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What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 9 of 30, by Caluser2000

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Of course if you are stupid enough to use floppy disks not set up to boot off you'll get errors on start up if the disk is in the fdd. I find Maxtor and Conner hdds more problematic compared to BigFoots. I've got a bin full of floppies in various formats dating back to the early 80s through mid 90s from a number of different system types that function just fine fwiw. In the time I've been using them I guess about 20 floppies all up have given me grief on my systems. Generally make copies of the originals and install from those just in case. Storing in damp conditions will cause them to get moldy though. Was given a box of 5.25" 360k floppies and 95% had mold on the media.

Remember getting an OEM copy of Windows 95B that came on 1.7meg formated 3.5" floppies. 22 iirc. Just bought them out of curiousity. No worries with them Ended up selling them to a laptop owner that had no cdrom. OS/2 installation floppies on the other hand can be problematic I've found. Nothing like getting through to the last couple of disks and get an error.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 10 of 30, by Jed118

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^^^

Wow I guess I am stupid for keeping a pile of unlabelled diskettes near my PC (one of which was the boot disk I needed) and taking 45 seconds to cycle through them to get these errors.

Thanks for the floppy tips mate, uber useful for a noob like me. Maybe you can tell me something useful and point me to the direction of proper floppy labels instead?

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Reply 11 of 30, by Caluser2000

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Just pop down to any stationary store a get suitable Avery or equivalent lables. They work just fine. Just using a marker and putting "boot" on the disk slider would help if labels aren't available.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 12 of 30, by SirNickity

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You are really missing the point of this thread. No one is or was asking for any actual help or advice. It was meant to be amusing and nothing else. As an owner of a floppy storage box full of unlabeled disks, I can relate.

I can't even guess at how many times I tried to boot from a Sound Blaster Pro install disk. At least I knew the memtest floppy is the one with the write-protect enabled.

Reply 13 of 30, by Caluser2000

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Repeating the same procedure without learning from it is just plain dumb. As I mentioned above labels are easy to get and is part and parcel of using floppy disks. Saves wasting time.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 14 of 30, by canthearu

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Caluser2000 wrote:

Repeating the same procedure without learning from it is just plain dumb. As I mentioned above labels are easy to get and is part and parcel of using floppy disks. Saves wasting time.

That would be true if the problem in the first place actually mattered at all. Obviously the OP doesn't care he had to cycle through a few disks to find his boot disk, and finds it amusing rather than problematic all the different messages the disks give.

I'm not so lucky when I put disks into the computer, I'd get the same error message on all of them because I have needed to format them all again to see which are good and which I will need to trash.

Also, removing labels off floppies is the real pain. If you need to do it, I can only suggest lots of warm air to soften the adhesives and metholyted spirits to remove anything left over after cleaning.

Reply 15 of 30, by Caluser2000

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Just put the new lable over the top of the old one.... I just soak old lables with crc 5.56 or similar as it softens the paper and adhesive. Scrape the label off with a blunt knife and wipe the adhesive off with a clean rag soak with a little crc.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 16 of 30, by Jed118

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You ever have a label peel and get the disk stuck in the drive? Seems like more work than just swapping.

There's a reason I don't immediately label these diskettes - a lot of the time I'm just moving drivers over, or doing something I will only be needing to do once - this computer is for sale. I don't want to soak diskettes in anything, either.

Turns out my labelled diskette I needed was on the balcony, which is a great place for it. 😊

I'll say one thing - for my own systems, I have everything labelled and put in diskette boxes in organized shelving. This time, I got some new diskettes from a prof and I mixed them in with my pile, somehow. I suspect my wife or kid may have had something to do with it... Anyways I knew ONE of them would boot, and so on the 5th try it did. It would take me more time to go to the other room, turn on my fastest booting computer, and then read the contents of the diskette than it did to put them in the drive and wait 5 seconds for each error.

I can assure you, Caluser2000, this is not a S.O.P. around here, but nor do I treat my hobby and side business with rigidity and ruthless efficacy - did you notice most of the work is done on the floor?

Come on man, it's fun, and I'm having fun, and I don't mind sharing my amusing results with the community.

Now, for plugging in power to outputs, yeah, go find that thread and ream me out for something proper. 🤣

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 17 of 30, by SirNickity

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Caluser2000 wrote:

Repeating the same procedure without learning from it is just plain dumb. As I mentioned above labels are easy to get and is part and parcel of using floppy disks. Saves wasting time.

Dumb... really? Dude, I think the battery died in your sense of humor and is now corroding everything around it. If I had a dollar for every CD-R I burned and then never bothered to caress with a Sharpie, I could retire early. Floppies, being trivially rewritable, hardly ever held their contents long enough to make a label worth the time to peel it from the backing.

I have working copies of all my OS, driver, app, and game floppies now, and some day I will find an Avery pack of floppy-size labels to re-create all the original disk artwork. Until then, I will probably shuffle through stacks of identical disks and try to figure out which one had pkzip on it .. like, four dozen times. Yet I will somehow manage to cope with the atrocity of it all. If that is the worst thing to happen to me -- or even the "dumbest" thing I do -- I will consider that a good freakin year.

Reply 18 of 30, by Caluser2000

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SirNickity wrote:

I have working copies of all my OS, driver, app, and game floppies now, and some day I will find an Avery pack of floppy-size labels to re-create all the original disk artwork.

Just do a search for Avery floppy disk labels https://www.amazon.com/avery-diskette-labels/ … diskette+labels Just get the template use a laser or inkjet printer and you are done. Even Staples has them available. Easy peal off even. If you just want plain lined labels https://www.amazon.com/pieces-EDL-103N-colors … gateway&sr=8-24 I hope that is helpful.

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There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉