Skyscraper wrote:

I had a big box with ~30 old HDDs that took a 1 meter* nose dive down on my parquet floor half a year ago. Im now testing to see which drives survived and which drives sounds like waste shredders. The HDDs were just stacked in the box without any protection at all so I will be happy if half of them survived...

With parked heads and stationary discs, harddrives can easily take brief shocks upwards of 100G without issues. Just saying 😀

kithylin wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I do not have the patience for surface scans 😁, perhaps with the smallest disk,in the box (170MB) but with larger disks a surface scan takes ages 😜

These disks will not be used for anything critical but I still want to know which ones I can throw away.

It's your life... any disk with even one bad sector will lead to corruption and data loss.. and should be discarded. Personally I won't use any mechanical drive with a bad sector on it, IDE or sata. Along those notes, I have an older 80 MB IBM SCSI drive somewhere in a box that still has no bad sectors and spins up fine.. 😀

My 16 MHz 286 dosnt agree, its 20MB MFM drive had lots of damaged sectors when I got it. If I remember correrctly 3% of the sectors on the disk is bad all marked with scandisks surface scan by the previous user over 20 years ago. During the months I have had the system it has never got another damaged sector or any data loss. The machine has been running non stop when I have been at home and awake lately as I use it as a midi jukebox among other things.

I doubt you will find many MFM drives without bad sectors 😜

When it comes to modern HDDs for modern computers I rarely use damaged disks but when it comes to sub 10GB disks for retro computers Im less fussy. Disks that make grinding noises or disks where damaged sectors spread like the plague gets binned though regardless of size.

jwt27 wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I had a big box with ~30 old HDDs that took a 1 meter* nose dive down on my parquet floor half a year ago. Im now testing to see which drives survived and which drives sounds like waste shredders. The HDDs were just stacked in the box without any protection at all so I will be happy if half of them survived...

With parked heads and stationary discs, harddrives can easily take brief shocks upwards of 100G without issues. Just saying 😀

I have noticed that...

One of these I already had, the other is a new toy for my 486 retro gaming box. Can't find my DX33 chip, though, it's currently got a DX2-66 without a heatsink which may be pushing it..

I tested my new PC Chips M209 286 motherboard with a Harris 20MHz CPU.

This motherboard and/or the brand new old stock I/O card did not like a late 90s floppy drive in good condition, it was convinced that my bootable floppy wasnt a bootable floppy... I switched floppy drive to a really old filthy drive from the late 80s and everything was fine 😀

First results at the slowest BIOS speed setting, I think the settings are 10, 16 and 20 MHz.

Landmark 10 MHz

MIPS 10MHz

After I had booted DOS for the first time I removed the BIOS chips for cleaning, I also removed the FPU. I did not put the FPU back as I want to test it in my other 286 to see if I can get my old Auto Cad running, thats why there is no FPU results in Landmark at 20 MHz.

Landmark 20 MHz

MIPS 20 MHz, the Compaq 386 seems rather slow, dosnt it? 😜

That's a big difference between an XT and an 8MHz AT!

I'm currently finishing a bit more of the build of my main retro box, which is multi booting DOS6, OS/2 Warp 4 and Windows XP (mostly so I can hopefully run Tie Fighter using a USB joystick). Downloading and applying 164 updates (on top of a base XP SP3 install) is taking a *long* time on a pentium ii, even with an SSD linked up to it.

Chalked up the list of achievements my 486SX has (Hooker) and got it to serve a web page halfway across the world (The page was received, as planned, by two other users) though it isn't very nice because it is befitting of the machine's persona. The image contained is questionable, but if you really want to see the page, I have a screenie here; http://s26.postimg.org/55lizlzg9/HOEPAG.png

I wonder if I can still run Adobe Premiere with the U5S? Back when I used the system for video it had a 486DX-33 installed. I shall try tomorrow.

I've said it before, but technically nearly everything I do is retro related because most of my stuff is old and even when it isn't, it is often working on things that are for or about old systems anyway. Very few items in my home were made after the 1990s. I cannot even listen to music without partaking in "Retro Activity" because my stereo passed the 40 years marker some time ago so far as I am aware. Oh, I also played with my Yamaha MU90R because I was tempted to learn that Tony Orr song.

Skyscraper wrote:

I will be testing them using the same unscientific method I used for the smaller drives only with DOS 7, FAT32 and a motherboard […]
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I will be testing them using the same unscientific method I used for the smaller drives only with DOS 7, FAT32 and a motherboard with better support for disks larger than 2.1GB.

1. See if the disk spins up without making nasty sounds
2. See if the system can find the drive.
3. Remove all partitions with fdisk
4. Create a new one using 100% of the availible space
5. Format the partition and see if any faulty sectors are found or if I hear any grinding noises.
6. Pretend that the disk is totally fine.

This should work for all disks as the largest disk in the box is 40GB, fdisk handles disk sizes up to at least 128GB even if it fails to report the available space before creating the partition for disks larger than 32GB.

I always do an MHDD and an HDAT2 test, from the Hiren's Boot CD suite of DOS programs.
That tells you the exact condition of each sector of the disk, but apparently doesn't work on non-LBA HDDs.
The MS-DOS scandisk mentioned in a post is a good idea, as well as the "hook it on a newer system and HD-Tune it". 😀
But these will only complain if a sector is not readable/writable, not if it has little problem. 😒

HighTreason wrote:

Chalked up the list of achievements my 486SX has.

I like this idea - seeing what an old computer CAN do rather than reflecting on what it can't.

My ten year old daughter got up to some retro activity today. She used Windows 3.1 for the first time. And she took the opportunity to mock me:

I was inspired by the article on /. today about Win 95 being the most influential OS and that if you were to put one of today's 15 year olds in front of it they would find it easy to use because of its legacy in today's OSes. The whole article is flawed but, aside from that, I would say Win3x.1 was the first genuinely usable OS on the IBM PC. OS/2 doesn't count because it was dropped.

brassicGamer wrote:

My ten year old daughter got up to some retro activity today. She used Windows 3.1 for the first time. And she took the opportunity to mock me:

http://i858.photobucket.com/albums/ab148/city … 0901_142106.jpg

I was inspired by the article on /. today about Win 95 being the most influential OS and that if you were to put one of today's 15 year olds in front of it they would find it easy to use because of its legacy in today's OSes. The whole article is flawed but, aside from that, I would say Win3x.1 was the first genuinely usable OS on the IBM PC. OS/2 doesn't count because it was dropped.

Amazing! 😁

Did she get the 20 pound note, though? xD

brassicGamer wrote:

My ten year old daughter got up to some retro activity today. She used Windows 3.1 for the first time. And she took the opportunity to mock me:
http://i858.photobucket.com/albums/ab148/city … 0901_142106.jpg

When I have children, I want children like that.

Work, work and more work 😒

At least I had time to test the PC Chips M209 board with a HDD today, the BIOS has options for the usual standard disk types 1-46, luckily it also has a setting for disk type 47, user defined 😀

When I toggled to disk type 47 I saw what the last user of this board had used for disk since I never have cleared the BIOS and the setting was still stored although the battery looks like shit and I have had all removable chips on the board removed and cleaned, not to mention drowned the battery area and BIOS chips in vinegar and White Gas...

Cylinders: 48369, Heads: 95, Precomp: 49150, Landingzone:, 40959, Sectors: 239, Size: 11951MB

That is what I call a large enough drive for a 286 😁. I though newer disks ignored Precomp and Landingzone settings? Perhaps that why he did set Precomp to a higher value than the Cylinder number?

Im using my smallest IDE drive, at least of the ones I could find. Its a 170MB Maxtor drive from 1994, I set the Precomp and Landingzone values to the max Cylinder value of 866 as I have no idea what the values should be, I thought they diddnt matter other than for MFM drives. The drive seems to work perfectly with the motherboard and I/O controller card.

The PC Chips 209 motherboard is not supposed to support more than 4MB memory but in the BIOS there in an option to set up to 15360KB extended memory... perhaps its only for memory on ISA expansion cards but if I had some 4MB modules I would at least try 😀

I can set the upper 384KB memory of the first 1MB as EMS memory in the BIOS but XMS can not be activated without using at least 2MB memory for some reason, I guess PC Chips got lazy with their BIOS programming. If you can use the upper 384KB as XMS 1MB is pretty much all you need for a 286 system but as it is I need to remove the DIPs and install SIPPs, or SIMM sockets with SIMMs to be more exact as 1MB SIPP modules seems rare.

Don't worry guys, I uh, think I know what I'm doing...

Yet another flawless victory!

I could not get more than 560KB conventional memory free with the PC Chips M209 80286 motherboard equipped with 1MB DIP memory as the board dosnt support using the upper 384KB as XMS memory.

Someone said it was a pain in the rear to fit SIPP modules in this kind of SIPP socket compared to the round hole style SIPP socket.

But fitting the SIMM sockets in the SIPP sockets was as easy as fitting the SIMM modules in the SIMM sockets 😀

And it does work!

Issues with too little conventional memory is a thing of the past, DOS=HIGH! 😀

This must have been the most easy mod I ever done but I will sleep like a baby tonight!

jwt27 wrote:

Don't worry guys, I uh, think I know what I'm doing...

I'm having trouble deciphering this image. Is there some kind of servo arrangement involved?

brassicGamer wrote:

My ten year old daughter got up to some retro activity today. She used Windows 3.1 for the first time. And she took the opportunity to mock me:

I was inspired by the article on /. today about Win 95 being the most influential OS and that if you were to put one of today's 15 year olds in front of it they would find it easy to use because of its legacy in today's OSes. The whole article is flawed but, aside from that, I would say Win3x.1 was the first genuinely usable OS on the IBM PC. OS/2 doesn't count because it was dropped.

Your daughter writes very well. Way better than I did at 10

alexanrs wrote:

Did she get the 20 pound note, though? xD

She was being overly cheeky as she had just received one from her Granny (my mum) for her birthday!

Great letter... Ah those pesky 10 year olds!

brassicGamer wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

Don't worry guys, I uh, think I know what I'm doing...

I'm having trouble deciphering this image. Is there some kind of servo arrangement involved?

It's a floppy drive, I removed the top head. Normally you wouldn't touch this since it takes ages to get it all aligned again...